“There is virtually no supply of low sulphur fuel oil and all the coastal ships including the feeder container vessels plying between Indian ports on the east coast will come to a standstill from this week as soon as they exhaust whatever little stock they had,” a top executive with a shipping company told the local Hindu BusinessLine today.

Sanko, the biggest shipping casualty of the 1980s, went bust again in 2012 and had since been cutting its fleet back in size dramatically, down from triple figures, to one solitary panamax bulker, the 2012-built Sanko Fortune (pictured) as of the start of this year.

The IMO 2020 regulation has its first global trade scalp with news from south Asia where coastal shipping operations along India’s eastern coast risk grinding to a halt later this week due to the scarcity of low sulphur fuel oil.

Maritime Business World