COS Weekly Newsletter - Friday, 3 December 2021

Almost 200 container truck drivers at two companies serving the Port of Vancouver will no longer be walking off the job this week. Unifor has advised that agreements have been reached with Prudential Transportation and Aheer Transportation Truckers at the two companies had voted to strike if their employers didn't match an agreement reached earlier this year with Harbour Link Transportation, which pays truckers $60 per hour after the first hour they spend waiting for their vehicles to be loaded and unloading. The now-signed agreement includes drug, dental, health and insurance coverage, along with increased payments for time spent waiting for their trucks to be loaded and unloaded.  Unifor says the strike would have impacted about 10 per cent of the vehicles servicing the port and threatened Canada’s overall port stability at a time when the western supply chain is facing increasing pressure after recent storms flooded transportation routes.

Cooling temperatures with the potential for light snow across some areas of southwestern B.C. is forecasted through the weekend. Evacuation orders for multiple communities impacted by flooding remain in place.  The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority has advised that CP’s mainline between Vancouver and Kamloops remains operational with both CP and CN trains transiting eastbound and westbound. Track inspections and maintenance activities are ongoing and low-speed restrictions remain in place. Further progress has been made on the repairs to CN’s rail line between Kamloops and Boston Bar. Anticipated restoration of the line remains late-Friday, December 3. Rail service on the restored line will resume when it is deemed safe to operate.

The Greater Victoria Harbour Authority released its draft schedule for the 2022 season on Thursday, with the first cruise ship to dock in a Canadian port in two years slated to arrive on April 6. The schedule anticipates 350 ship calls delivering 795,000 passengers to the Victoria Cruise Terminal between March and October next year. These numbers are equivalent with pre-COVID numbers in 2019. The 2022 season will see three vessels, the Norwegian Encore, Majestic Princess and Quantum of the Seas, make their first-ever call in the port.

Svitzer, AP Moller-Maersk's towing operation, has signed an agreement with Robert Allan Ltd to design the world’s first fuel cell tug for harbour operations, running on green methanol. The project builds on close cooperation between Svitzer and Maersk with the aim to jointly explore the combination of methanol fuel cells, batteries, storage/handling systems, electric drives and propulsion units as a carbon neutral alternative to the conventional fossil fuelled propulsion train. The intent is to extract and apply knowledge and operational experience of methanol feasibility from the near shore small scale tug onto larger ocean-going container vessels. The 80 tons bollard pull newbuild tug with escort notation will come with a hybrid electrical propulsion system solution where fuel cells can be dimensioned to deliver a specific amount of sustained bollard pull using fuel cells alone, adding additional power from the batteries during the short but often frequent peaks that characterizes towage.

The Minister of Transport, Honourable Omar Alghabra has signed the Interim Order Respecting Vessel Restrictions Due to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outlining new travel restrictions and vaccination requirements for Canadian vessels, foreign non-essential passenger vessels, and marine pilots.  Supporting documents include Ship Safety Bulletin No. 17/2021: Measures for Persons (other than passengers) on Canadian Vessels and Foreign Passenger Vessels Operating in Canadian Waters to Mitigate the Spread of COVID-19 and Ship Safety Bulletin No. 18/2021: Measures to Support Safe Cruise Travel in Canada. 

Public Works and Government Services Canada has issued a Request for Supply Arrangement (RFSA) for in-water vessel cleaning for various departments and agencies across Canada.  The RFSA will establish a list of Qualified Contractors by streams based on the equipment proposed and vessel coating.

The Government of Canada will invest $2.8 million in Victoria-based Open Ocean Robotics through Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC). This is the second SDTC investment in Open Ocean Robotics (OOR) and part of a continuing collaboration that is helping the company advance its cleantech solution for gathering ocean data and protecting the marine environment. The company used previous funding to build one of its first solar-powered uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) prototypes. Its USVs are designed to monitor and protect marine environments for months at a time, without producing greenhouse gas emissions. They capture key data to help conserve marine biodiversity, prevent overfishing and other threats to ocean health, and better understand the impacts of climate change.

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is implementing new requirements for all air travellers to provide proof of a negative COVID antigen or a nucleic acid amplification test within 24 hours prior to departing from the last foreign departure point prior to arriving in the US.  This includes US citizens, vaccinated and unvaccinated. The new requirements take effect at 00:01 EST on Monday, December 6, 2021.  There are no exemptions for those travelling as part of a crew change in the new measures. The International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) and other major transport organizations say that world leaders’ knee-jerk reactions to the Omicron COVID variant are putting transport workers and the global supply chain at greater risk of collapse.

Pacific Basin Shipping Limited has launched its Carbon Neutral Voyage Programme for customers wanting carbon neutral shipping.  Customers are offered the option of voluntarily offsetting voyage emissions from the transportation of their cargoes on Pacific Basin ships. To facilitate carbon offsets for both its PB Carbon Neutral Voyage Programme and its global shore-side operations, Pacific Basin has partnered with CLP Innovation Enterprises Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hong Kong-headquartered power company CLP Holdings Limited (CLP), which is supplying Pacific Basin’s carbon emissions offset programme with independently verified carbon credits derived from CLP’s wind and solar farms in Asia. In December last year, Pacific Basin pledged to offset all carbon emissions from its global shore-side operations starting in 2020, including all office activities, commuting and business and crew travel.

One of two new CSL Group's self-unloading ships, MV Koasek, can be seen regularly trading on the West Coast.  Delivered on August 30, 2021, the vessel operates in the CSL Americas fleet as part of the CSL International pool along with its new sister-ship, CSL Kajika.  The 77,250 DWT vessels were converted at COSCO Nantog Shipyard.

Both CSL Kajika and CSL Koasek are the result of an innovative conversion project that saw the transformation of these two former Kamsarmax bulk carriers into modern, gravity-fed self-unloaders. Each vessel is 225.30 metres in length, 32.26 in breadth, with a boom length of 80 metres.

The two ships represent CSL's continued investment in supporting its customers with modern, fuel-efficient and high-performing sustainable assets that meet their evolving needs and regulatory requirements.