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Living with 10-year-olds
1st Jul 2026
China Shipping Lines (image: Shutterstock)
When a vessel approaches ten-years-old, or more, it is reaching an age where it could be too young to be scrapped while also posing a return-on-investment headache for owners looking to achieve emissions reductions through technological improvements.
More stringent global regulation could change the economics of emissions reduction technology, but the need for global regulation is seen as paramount by many in the industry.
The direction of travel appears to be clear, leaving a cohort of existing vessels – those around their mid-operational lifespan – caught in a kind of retrofit limbo often with insufficient payback time for high-cost retrofits, such as engine or fuel tank modifications.
Although some vessels have been successfully converted, such as