The shipping industry has been very accommodating. They don't like to be portrayed as environmental villains. They know they have a problem. From the time that I first started working with them 10 years ago, even before Transport Canada brought in their regulations in 2006, we had been going to Montreal and meeting with the umbrella group, the Shipping Federation of Canada. We told them that they could dramatically reduce their risk if they put salt water into the tanks before they came into the Great Lakes.
They didn't tell us they were doing it, but between one year and the next year when we started sampling, we noticed a huge difference in what had happened. We couldn't figure out why we weren't seeing fresh water in the ships anymore. We went back to them and their lawyer told us that they had instructed all of their partners that they had to start flushing salt water through. They are very willing to allow us to board their vessels and to run experiments on board their vessels.
The current one that we're working on is to see whether or not we could combine ballast water exchange with chlorination to get some type of additive benefit. I'm somewhat reluctant to say a lot about it because we've only been able to do one trial thus far. The ship began in Port-Alfred, Quebec with all 10 ballast tanks loaded with fresh water. Two of the tanks were going to service control, so we would sample all 10 tanks initially. Two of the tanks were chlorinated, three of the tanks had ballast water exchange, and three of the tanks had ballast water exchange and chlorination. We had samples collected at time zero from all 10 tanks.
When the ship went on its way down to Brazil, they didn't like it, but we had them stop in mid-ocean for about 12 hours. All they did was put water through the tanks in which we needed ballast water exchange to happen. Some of those tanks also got chlorination at the same time. This just happened 10 days ago.
What we found for the groups that we've analyzed thus far were three different bacterial indicators, as well as algae or phytoplankton. In both cases, we saw that the lowest abundances of organisms are always in tanks that have both ballast water exchange and chlorination. They appear to meet the proposed IMO D-2 standard, which is a ballast water treatment standard that's going to be implemented in the future.
If we can demonstrate this with three more trials that we're going to be conducting over the course of the summer, I think it's something that Transport Canada may wish to consider, because once ships put certified ballast water treatment systems on board, we're not going to actually sample the biota that's contained in the tanks to see whether or not the ship is compliant. All we're going to look at is whether or not they have a compliance system on board.
Unfortunately, sometimes technology breaks down. You run the risk that if we're running a compliance system, but something happens to it in mid-voyage, they could actually be carrying risky water. We think it might be advantageous if you're still doing ballast water exchange, in addition to the treatment. It's a backup, if you will, to ensure that the ships are coming in with the lowest risk possible.