Hong Kong ports may soon be using drones to detect high sulphur emissions from vessels entering their waters after the city’s Environmental Protection Department completes its testing stage.
The sensor-equipped drones – designed by the University of Science and Technology and funded by the city – will be flown into smoke plumes spewed from ships and conduct real-time measurements mainly of sulphur dioxide emissions.
Dr Zhi Ning , who heads up the university’s environment and sustainability division, said the idea was to provide support to what would otherwise be time and labour-intensive enforcement work.
Hong Kong is about a year ahead of the global International Maritime Organisation (IMO) regulations – which will be effective from January 1 next year – dictating that all vessels within Hong Kong waters should use marine fuel with a less than 0.5% sulphur content.
Ning said in a statement that previous policing methods had been limited to examining ship log books on fuel use, visually assessing smoke opacity or manually extracting fuel samples for analysis.
“Plumes of smoke can disperse very quickly. With the new laws, we needed to design a system to screen ship emissions that is quick, stable, accurate and able to provide scientific evidence. It also has to be compact and lightweight,” he explained.
The standard drones come with brick-sized sensors strapped on to scan pollutants such as sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulates. The device can detect such substances up to 50 metres away from a vessel’s funnel.
The Environmental Protection Department will run prototype trials over Hong Kong waters next month and hopes to deploy them for use by the end of the year.