Cargo and bunker tank information for oil outflow calculations - Designs of tankers, container ships and bulk carriers representative for the Northern Baltic Sea area

Oil spills from maritime activities can have detrimental effects to marine ecosystems and cause economic damages both to ship operators and to coastal communities. One widely used approach for reducing the adverse effects of possible oil spills is maritime oil spill risk assessment and response preparedness planning.

It is widely acknowledged that especially ship collisions and groundings pose a high risk of oil spills, both in navigation in open water and in conditions characterized by sea ice. Correspondingly, comparatively much research has been dedicated to estimating the oil spill sizes in ship collision and grounding accidents in risk assessment and response preparedness planning contexts. Nevertheless, most of these methods provide rather crude estimates of the spill sizes, or have a limited scope of application when more detailed estimates are produced. Hence, comprehensive methods for determining the oil outflow consequences in ship collision and grounding accidents are still lacking. Such consequences models could however be useful for response authorities to determine the target spill size for a given sea area and plan the necessary resources for responding to such a spill.

In order to increase the realism of consequence models of accidental oil outflow in ship collision and grounding accidents, it is necessary to combine different data sources and models of specific phenomena. For a given accidental impact scenario, the damage extent inflicted to the struck ship hull needs to be evaluated, and subsequently the oil outflow should be assessed in the specific environmental context. The hull damage extent and the oil outflow are conditional to the ship layout and the loading condition. Integrated modeling approaches combining these elements have been proposed. However, a comprehensive dataset of the required information about the ship main dimensions and cargo and bunker tank details for the accidental damage extent assessment and oil outflow in particular scenarios is still lacking.

The aim of this report is to fill this gap by presenting information on vessel particulars of selected vessel types, with a focus on tankers, bulk carriers and container vessels. The scope is typical vessels navigating in the Northern Baltic Sea area. These vessels are selected based on an analysis of the vessel traffic in this area, based on data from the Automatic Identification System. To facilitate risk analyses based on the presented information, the report also contains a strength-of-evidence assessment.