sales,” said McDonough. “When a sizable part of your mar-
ket is going backward, obviously there is considerable pressure
placed on the remaining sectors. Fortunately, we are seeing an
uptick in ship repair and maintenance, which will help offset the
loss of volume from NB. Many of the vessels completed during
the building boom are now drydocking for their first mainte-
nance cycle.”
The potential contribution to improve ship energy efficiency
offers a significant growth potential with regards to transition to
more premium hull coating solutions, according to Jotun. “Key
factors to achieve this growth include increased market aware-
ness of the importance of hull performance,” said Evensen. “In
collaboration with the marine coatings industry Jotun is cur-
rently leading the initiative to establish reliable measurability
of hull performance. An historical lack of accurate and reliable
measurability on hull performance has resulted in limited in-
centive to invest lifetime performance in both newbuilding and
maintenance situations. Hence, such initiative is considered ab-
solutely crucial to increase market awareness and contribute to
growth in the marine coatings market.”
Jotun reported that although a reduced new building actively
reduces the demand from yard countries located in northeast
Asia, this area still represents the largest volumes due to new
building and dry docking activity. “With regards to locations
of owners and management companies, Europe represents an
important area,” said Evensen.
Environmental Regulations
Shipping is global in nature with the result that even regional
and local environmental regulations may have an industry-wide
impact. “As we see it the impact of environmental regulation
both recently enacted and on the horizon, on marine coatings is
largely twofold,” said Evensen. “On the one hand it is making
it technically more challenging to deliver coatings that perform.
At the same time, it is serving to increase the value add associ-
ated with higher levels of performance – in particular where the
coatings have an impact on energy efficiency. As such, we see
environmental regulations as an important driver of innovation
in the marine coatings market.”
Sherwin-Williams is actively developing coatings systems
with lower VOCs, higher solids or waterborne alternatives in
order to provide sensible options for the ship owner. “As far as
the emerging markets go, we believe it is just a matter of time be-
fore they adopt more stringent regulations,” said McDonough.
“The difficulties they will face in enacting regulations, will be in
finding the proper balance between the benefit to the environ-
ment, the economic impact and the constraints of technology.”
Current Trends
Sherwin-Williams has been active in pursuing new technologies.
Higher solids, lower VOC and waterborne coatings remain a
constant focus in R&D. “Antifouling technology remains a fo-
cus for the marine market where fuel savings can result in a
much lower cost of operation for owners,” McDonough added.
“Obviously, IMO regulations on ballast tank and cargo oil tank
coatings have put a renewed emphasis on epoxy lining technol-
ogy that we continue to pursue. Sherwin-Williams strives to be
at the forefront of the ‘next generation’ and ‘breakthrough’ tech-
nologies that meet needs not yet articulated.”
Sherwin-Williams offer ultra-high solids FastClad ER, which
is a single-coat ballast tank system engineered to address the
challenging application issue of coating irregular surfaces inside
immersion service structure. The company reports, its edge re-
tentive epoxy chemistry dramatically extends the service life of a
tank, replacing traditional epoxies which tend to shrink during
the curing phase and can lead to early corrosion.
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Coatings World | 29
