Ageing Fleet Alert

The dry bulk market is under pressure on two fronts: demand is softening, and the fleet is getting older. At the same time, regulators and industry bodies are tightening their focus on safety and sustainability across the supply chain. In such a volatile environment, operational resilience is no longer optional. For ship owners and operators, effective asset management is both a safeguard for compliance and a decisive commercial advantage.

At the end of last year, RightShip, the vetting agency and self-appointed industry ‘equaliser’ (by the cargo-owning charterers) for safety and environmental standards, sparked controversy and debate when it cut the inspection threshold of dry bulk vessels from 14 to 10 years. While the organisation rowed back a little following industry criticism and concern over timings and flexibility, the initiative has still been rolled out (from March this year), albeit with a more phased approach.

RightShip’s position and message is clear. It believes that dry bulk vessels are lagging significantly behind other sectors in terms of safety standards, and it presented various statistics to prove – in its view – that dry bulk vessels are 10 times more likely to be detained by port state control than other ship classes. Again, according to RightShip’s data, dry bulk carriers experience the highest incident ratio, including more fatalities. The concern is intensified by the ageing dry bulk fleet and the increased safety risks that are associated with that.

Ageing fleets and rising risk

To be fair, this is a trend that is not just limited to the dry bulk sector. Indeed, the global commercial fleet is the oldest it has been for over 40 years, with the average vessel age at 17.4 years; the average age of a dry bulk vessel is 14.7 years, although fleet ageing is more pronounced in smaller vessel classes where many Handysize and Supramax units are now over 20 years.

While there may be a commercial rationale to expand the lifetime of a vessel, it does not make commercial sense when it has a significant impact on safety and efficiency across the entire maritime supply chain. This was highlighted in a recent DNV annual maritime safety report for 2025, which makes for sobering reading.

According to DNV, in 2024 over half of all safety incidents involved vessels aged 20 years or older. Casualties to crew increased by 358 from 2023 to 2024, with 285 incidents involving ships over 25 years old. 83% of these incidents were down to machinery damage or failure; often due to preventable issues such as improper lubrication, undetected wear, or just skipped inspections. From a dry bulk perspective, due to the heavy nature of their cargo, carriers are also particularly susceptible to corrosion and metal fatigue, especially on the side of the vessels, as well as a loss of shell plating. Fundamentally, it highlights the critical link between ageing hardware and breakdowns, and the real need for properly funded and effectively implemented maintenance plans.

The cost of failure

Ultimately, the cost of failure in terms of downtime and disruption is significantly more than the cost of investing in preventing it from happening in the first place. The recent incident from March this year being a case in point, when ship traffic was suspended in the Bosphorus Strait, one of the world’s most strategic and busiest maritime routes, after a dry cargo vessel suffered an engine failure while travelling northbound. This has also happened to other dry bulk vessels in other major chokepoints for global shipping, such as the M/V Glory and the Supramax vessel Xin Hai Tong 23 in the Suez Canal in 2023. Both were due to engine failure and both resulted in significant and costly disruptions to trade.

What is clear is that this issue is not going to go away. The reality is that many vessels in this ageing commercial fleet were built to standards and technologies of a different era. As they continue operating past their intended lifespans, they face greater risks from structural fatigue, obsolete systems, and limited compatibility with modern safety solutions. On top of this, as the industry looks to meet its decarbonisation targets in a future fuels world, and with many vessels predicted to use clean energy such as ammonia, which is highly toxic, the potential negative ecological and safety challenges in the event of equipment or machinery damage becomes even more significant and catastrophic.

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Read the article online at: https://www.drybulkmagazine.com/special-reports/24122025/ageing-fleet-alert/