The Great Lakes Ballast Technology Demonstration Project is a joint U.S. and Canadian cooperative project that recently funded three six-month, full-scale design studies of promising ballast water treatment systems. The intent of each study is to fully develop, for a specified “target” vessel, the contract design, and life cycle cost of a reliable, optimized flow-through, onboard treatment system that effectively removes living organisms from the ship’s ballast water before it is discharged into an ecosystem other than its original source. The authors address two of these three studies, selecting two different kinds of target vessels. These ships represent classes of vessels typically involved in ballast water discharge in the ports and waterways of the U.S. West Coast, Hawaii, and Alaska. This is one of the first efforts devoted to developing contract design level technical solutions, quantifying life-cycle costs, and assessing actual vessel operational impacts on effective ecosystem maintenance.

Full paper:  Contract Designs for Ballast Water Treatment Systems

Authors:  William J. Hurley, Jr., PE (Glosten), Spencer S. Schilling, Jr. (Herbert Engineering Corp.), and Thomas P. Mackey (Hyde Maritime)