UAE's Fujairah Port Bans Open-loop Scrubbers

FILE PHOTO: Capesize dry-bulk ship, the Great Tang, takes on bunker fuel in the Singapore Strait from the Kantek 2 bunker barge December 17, 2017. Photo via REUTERS/Roslan Khasawneh/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Capesize dry-bulk ship, the Great Tang, takes on bunker fuel in the Singapore Strait from the Kantek 2 bunker barge December 17, 2017. Photo via REUTERS/Roslan Khasawneh/File Photo
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UAE's Fujairah Port Bans Open-loop Scrubbers

FILE PHOTO: Capesize dry-bulk ship, the Great Tang, takes on bunker fuel in the Singapore Strait from the Kantek 2 bunker barge December 17, 2017. Photo via REUTERS/Roslan Khasawneh/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Capesize dry-bulk ship, the Great Tang, takes on bunker fuel in the Singapore Strait from the Kantek 2 bunker barge December 17, 2017. Photo via REUTERS/Roslan Khasawneh/File Photo

Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates has become the latest major port to ban a type of fuel exhaust cleaning system to comply with a coming tightening in rules regarding global sulfur emissions.

Under International Maritime Organization (IMO) rules that come into effect from 2020, ships will have to reduce the sulfur content in their fuel to less than 0.5 percent, compared with 3.5 percent now, Reuters reported.

This will lead to major changes upon global shippers and also oil refiners.

Fujairah’s harbor master said in a faxed document seen by Reuters that the port “has decided to ban the use of open-loop scrubbers in its waters ... (and) ships will have to use compliant fuel once the IMO 2020 sulfur cap comes into force.”

To comply with IMO 2020 rules, shippers can switch to burning cleaner but more expensive oil, invest in exhaust cleaning systems known as scrubbers that may allow them to still use cheaper high-sulfur fuels, or redesign vessels to run on alternatives like liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Scrubbers use water to clean up fuel emissions, preventing them from being released into the atmosphere.

Open-loop scrubbers are the cheapest option, but they have come under criticism as they wash heavy metals and sulfur from the waste water into seas.

Meanwhile, closed-loop scrubbers would store it for a controlled discharge in ports and are still accepted in most ports.

“The benefits of open-loop scrubbers are largely realized in open water during transit from one port to the next,” Reuters reported Douglas Raitt of ship classifier Lloyd’s Register as saying.



Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
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Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)

A new exhibition featuring artwork and poems from contemporary artists and former patients will go on show at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem, in London, the Guardian newspaper said on Monday.

The vivid dream that vanishes on waking but fragments of which remain tantalizingly out of reach all day. Powerful emotions – tears, terror, ecstasy, despair – caused not by real events, but by the brain’s activity between sleeping and waking.

“Dreams and nightmares have long been studied by psychologists,” the newspaper wrote.

Now they are the subject of a new exhibition featuring several artists that were patients at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem (sometimes known as Bedlam), and its sister institution, the Maudsley hospital.

The exhibit includes paintings by Charlotte Johnson Wahl, the late mother of Boris Johnson, who spent eight months as a patient at the Maudsley after a breakdown when her four children were aged between two and nine.

She created dozens of paintings while there, and held her first exhibition which sold out. “I couldn’t talk about my problems, but I could paint them,” she said later.

Two of Johnson Wahl’s paintings are included in the exhibition, Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions, which opens at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in August.

The centerpiece of the show is a huge installation, Night Tides, by contemporary artist Kate McDonnell. She uses swathes of bedding woven with disordered words to evoke the restlessness and clashing thoughts of insomnia.

According to Caroline Horton, professor of sleep and cognition and director of DrEAMSLab at Bishop Grosseteste university in Lincoln, “dreaming occurs during sleep, and sleep is essential for all aspects of mental and physical health.

Among other works featured in the exhibition is London’s Overthrow by Jonathan Martin, an arsonist held in the “criminal lunatic department” of Bethlem hospital from 1829 until his death in 1838. In 2012, the Guardian described it as a “mad pen-and-ink depiction of the capital’s destruction due to godlessness”.