Ballast Water Quarantine
Treatment of ballast and tank water against the D-2 organism standard, alongside the port state's own requirements. This is the duty with the nearest published validation behind it, which is why it leads.
Ballast water · Oil spills · Inorganic toxins
For once, the evidence came first.
In 2020 a NOAA-affiliated laboratory ran a nanobubble ozone system through ship ballast water. It killed what it was meant to, and organisms in the receiving water showed no statistically significant effect. ChemSlayer is that duty, carried to the ship instead of built into it.
<10 /m³
Viable organisms of 50 µm and above permitted in ballast discharge under the IMO D-2 standard
IMO
2017
The Ballast Water Management Convention entered into force on 8 September, after 30 states and 35 per cent of world tonnage ratified
IMO
$67.0bn
BP's cumulative pre-tax charge for Deepwater Horizon by the end of 2018 — response, settlements, litigation, one incident
BP Form 20-F, FY2018, filed with the SEC
The argument
Two jobs that only look like separate purchases.
Everything ChemSlayer works on is water that has been through something. A tank crossing an ocean. A slick and the dispersant sent after it. A discharge that met its consent limit on paper and still arrived warm, flat and airless.
Treating that water is the obvious half of the job. Sterilise the organisms, oxidise the organic contamination, meet the standard, sign the log. It is the half that gets specified, procured and audited, and it is the half every competitor sells.
The other half is what the treatment leaves behind. Oxidation consumes oxygen. So does decomposition, so does a spill, so does warm water sitting still. The receiving water frequently ends up worse on dissolved oxygen than it started, and nothing in the compliance framework asks about that.
So ChemSlayer does both, from the same hull, in the same pass. Sterilise, then ventilate. We call the second half a ventilator because that is honestly what it is — life support for water that cannot breathe on its own yet.
Boundaries, before anything else
What ChemSlayer does not do.
Port authorities, flag-state inspectors and spill commanders ask these four before they ask what the system is for. So they sit here, above the capability list, rather than in a footnote underneath it.
- It does not replace booms, skimmers or mechanical recovery in a spill. Bulk oil is recovered mechanically. We work on what the recovery cannot reach.
- It does not substitute for a type-approved ballast water management system where the flag or port state requires one. It supports compliance; it does not confer it.
- It does not run an unbounded oxidation stage in seawater. Ozone reacts with bromide roughly eighty-three times faster than with chloride, bromate formation is the consequence, and dose and contact time are limited per site and monitored.
- It does not clean contaminated sediment. Whatever has already settled on the bed of a basin is a dredging problem with a different contractor and a different consent attached.
Oversight as a design condition
No port should take a contractor's word about its own water.
So every programme is built with independent scientific oversight fixed to it from the outset. Not available on request — designed in, because it is the only serious answer to the question of how anybody would find out if this went badly.
Around a port that usually means the regional marine laboratory, the environment authority's own analysts, or a university department that has been sampling the basin for twenty years. The qualification is simple: they already answer for that water, and they will still answer for it long after our contract has expired.
Alarivean insists on their involvement rather than merely allowing it, and the reason is not modesty. Health and safety outrank the schedule on paper everywhere in this industry. That ordering only means something when somebody outside the company can watch it being tested.
- Before the first pass The baseline is agreed with the oversight party rather than handed to them once it suits us. Everything afterwards is read against it.
- While the work runs Access to the water-quality feeds our operations are steered by, as they arrive, through the contracted weeks — including the passes that go badly. Their own instruments are welcome alongside ours.
- After demobilisation They keep an independent copy of the record. Reconstructing what happened in your basin should never depend on our cooperation, or on us still being in business.
What the system is for
Three duties, one treatment stage.
Oil Spill Detox & Vent
Working behind the booms and the skimmers, not instead of them. Mechanical recovery takes the bulk; the oxidation and reoxygenation stage works on what is left in the water column and on the oxygen the event consumed.
Discharge and inorganic load
Outfalls, basin water and process discharge, where the receiving water carries the consequence rather than the pipe. Inorganic toxins are neutralised, and the oxygen the water lost goes back in on the same pass.
The evidence, stated properly
Somebody else's laboratory, somebody else's equipment, our mechanism.
NOAA's National Centres for Coastal Ocean Science reported in July 2020 that NCCOS-affiliated testing, run under a cooperative research and development agreement, evaluated a commercial nanobubble ozone system on ship ballast water and found it highly effective at controlling algae, bacteria and motile zooplankton.
The finding that matters commercially sits in the second half of that release: no statistically significant adverse residual-toxicity effect on organisms in the receiving water. A ballast treatment that meets the organism standard and then poisons the harbour it discharges into has not solved the problem, and port states have become very good at noticing.
Here is the caveat, in the same size type. That release names other technology and other partners. It does not name ChemSlayer, SeaBreather or Alarivean, and the cooperative agreement behind that testing is not ours either. It establishes that this approach works and can be operated without a residual-toxicity penalty. It does not establish our equipment, and we will not let it be read as though it does.
Alarivean does hold a research agreement of its own with NOAA, unrelated to that ballast work and covering the inorganic-toxin duty. It is private, as those agreements are. It is described where it belongs, on the ventilator page, and it is not an endorsement of anything.
Who this is bought by
Four desks, four reasons.
Ship operators
Fleet compliance across ports that read the same convention differently, and detentions that cost more than the treatment.
Port authorities
What arrives in the basin, what leaves it, and who answers for the water quality between the two.
Spill responders
A capability that arrives after the booms are set and works the water column the skimmers cannot.
Terminal and outfall operators
Receiving water that meets consent on paper and reads badly on dissolved oxygen in August.
The ventilator
Compliance says what you may discharge. It does not say what the water can survive.
NOAA defines coastal hypoxia as dissolved oxygen below 2 mg/L — the level too low to support most aquatic life. A review of sensitive estuarine species puts lethal-level oxygen higher still, at 4 to 6.4 mg/L.
Those two numbers are the entire ventilator argument, and they sit the opposite way round from most people's intuition. The regulatory line is the lower one. Water can clear it comfortably and still be below what the species living in that basin actually need, for weeks at a stretch, every summer.
Putting oxygen back is not a compliance obligation anywhere we operate. It is the difference between water that is legally acceptable and water that is alive, and the operators who care about the difference are usually the ones who have to look at the basin every morning.
Elsewhere in the system family
Immediate, Significant, Scaled
Tell us about the basin.
Which port, which traffic, which consent you operate under, and what your dissolved oxygen actually reads in August rather than what the permit allows. Alarivean answers with an assessment of that basin and an honest note on where this system would make no difference.