Port state control inspections of ballast water in seven countries will be carried out using a new portable test kit that is said to be more effective than existing alternatives.

French company aqua-tools, which specialises in microbiology analytical tools, has delivered the first in a series of 30 of its Rapid ATP Ballast Water Monitoring Systems to the Swiss testing and certification organisation, SGS Group, which has agreements to inspect and monitor treated ballast waters of vessels arriving in those countries.

A statement released on Monday (21 August) on behalf of aqua-tools said that the latest to contract SGS is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which has required ships to provide water samples since last week, but aqua-tools’ managing director Marc Raymond told BWTT that SGS did not wish to identify the other six states.

SGS and LuminUltra of Canada have been involved in developing the test equipment alongside aqua-tools, which has been designed to be “the most reliable and effective ballast water monitoring solution on the market,” according to SGS Group vice-president, global business development manager, Vladimiro Bonamin.

Like other test equipment, it uses bioluminescence techniques to monitor adenosine tri-phosphates (ATP), a molecular structure that is found in all living organisms. But other kits “are ineffective in high salinity waters,” Dr Bonamin said, and “do not provide a reliable tool with which to test the efficacy of ballast water treatment systems.”

Mr Raymond said that its test protocol, however, ensures that the proportion of light correlates exactly with the number of ATPs found in ballast water. Other luminometers “use a very rudimentary measurement ‘pen’ to take a small sample of the water” which he said is ineffective “since the reagent required to extract the ATP from the organism is heavily diluted and does not provide an accurate measurement from which to assess efficacy across the entire spectrum specified in the IMO D2 parameters list.”

This new system, uses “a unique method for extracting the ATP from the cell walls of all marine organisms, including those with hard shells, in a process that takes just five minutes,” he added. Test results themselves are available after 40 minutes, the statement said.

This means that technology is now available “to provide 100% indicative but accurate readings more or less immediately, without having to send samples off to laboratories.” It can also be used onboard ship.

• In its statement, aqua-tools listed 16 states where the SGS service is “available”. Mr Raymond was not able to say how this differs from the seven states where SGS provides PSC support, but BWTT understands that SGS has equipment in these locations but no formal national agreement to provide testing. Those states are: USA, Canada, South Africa, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, UAE, India, China, South Korea, Australia, Thailand and Taiwan.

• Last week, Chelsea Technologies announced that it was supplying ballast testing equipment to Saudi Aramco. It is not clear how that agreement functions alongside this latest aqua-tools/SGS arrangement.

Source: Marine Propulsion