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Maritime shipping is essential in global trade. The shipping industry uses fossil fuel with significant environmental impact as a result and a transition to renewable fuels may be part of the solution to reduce emissions. A fuel transition needs to be understood at all stages of the supply chain, ranging from feedstock to use in ships’ engines. The purpose of this paper is to do a synthesis of literature to provide an overview of main challenges and opportunities along potential supply chains of renewable methanol for maritime shipping, with a focus on bio-methanol. It is shown that renewable methanol is a technically viable option to reduce emissions from shipping and there are no major challenges with potential supply chains. Minor economic barriers that currently exist have the potential to be overcome with strengthening of environmental targets for shipping or if fuel oil prices revert to higher levels as seen previously.

The release of packaged or containerized dangerous goods during transport can have serious consequences on board a ship. This study was focused on identifying factors contributing to these types of releases and on investigating the contribution of dangerous goods accidents to overall container ship accident rates. Records of dangerous goods releases from a US and a UK database for an 11-year period covering 1998-2008 were analyzed to identify and categorize main contributing factors. The majority of releases, estimated as 97% of the US events and 94% of the UK events, did not follow another primary accident type such as a collision. Faults that occurred during activities such as preparation of the goods for transport, packaging, stuffing containers, and loading the ship were main factors contributing to the release of the dangerous goods on board the ship. For container ship casualties occurring worldwide during the same period, 1998-2008, accidents involving packaged dangerous goods were estimated to account for 15% of all fatalities. Self-ignition or ignition of incorrectly declared dangerous goods was identified as a contributing factor for the fatal accidents. Ensuring that dangerous goods are correctly prepared and documented for marine transport is thus very important for preventing releases and improving on board safety.

This paper presents an evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of a novel passenger monitoring system based on RFID technology for implementation onboard passenger ships. Such a system will be able to detect and keep track of passengers onboard the ship in emergency situations in order to provide crucial decision support to the officer in charge of evacuation. This will lead to increased safety and security on passenger ships. However, this increased safety will come at a certain cost. A methodology in line with Formal Safety Assessment is employed in order to assess the cost-effectiveness of the system, involving a thorough risk analysis.

In this paper we discuss the application of ToF-SIMS with an Au3 + primary ion beam, combined with principal components analysis (PCA) and discriminant function analysis (DFA) for the identification of individual strains of two Bacillus species. The ToF-SIMS PC-DFA methodology is capable of distinguishing bacteria at the strain levelbased onanalysis of surface chemical species. By classifying the data using hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) we are able to show quantitative separation of species and of these strains. This has taxonomic implications in the areas of rapid identification of pathogenic microbes isolated from the clinic, food and environment. # 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V.