Saudi Arabia’s oil giant Saudi Aramco targets to stop producing fuel oil at its refineries by 2024, as stricter environmental regulations for the shipping industry will significantly cut the largest source of demand for fuel oil, Abdulaziz M. Al-Judaimi, senior vice president of Downstream at Aramco, told S&P Global Platts in an interview published on Wednesday. The shipping industry is preparing for a major disruption of the types of fuels it will be using as early as the beginning of 2020, when stricter regulations for the sulfur content of fuel come into force. According to the new rules by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), only 0.5-percent or lower sulfur fuel oil should be used on ships beginning January 1, 2020, unless said ships have installed the so-called scrubbers—systems that remove sulfur from exhaust gas emitted by bunkers. Many ship owners are preparing for the new emission regulations and many […]