All IACS societies will issue new Common Rules for the scantlings of tankers and for bulk carriers on 1 January 2006. This was the decision following the IACS extraordinary council meeting in London last month.

Together with ABS and LR, DNV has for almost three years worked on the Joint Tanker Project (JTP), the development of new rules for tanker structure, while another IACS group, the Joint Bulker Project (JBP), has worked on the development of new rules for bulk-carrier structures throughout the past year.

The draft rules from both projects have been on public hearing since July this year, and more than 3,000 comments have been received for the tanker rules alone. These comments are now being considered, and final drafts of the rules are under preparation.

As the new rules have been developed by two distinct groups of classification societies, the two sets of rules will at this stage not be technically harmonised. There will be differences in approach to, among other aspects, external loads, fatigue calculations and global strength analysis.

"To meet the expectations of both the industry and the IMO we cannot, however, postpone the publication of the new rules until they are fully harmonised - that is a long-term process," says Terje Staalstrom, DNV's member in the IACS Council.

Staalstrom, along with Rune Torhaug, DNV's Steering Group member in the JTP, sees the decision from the IACS Council as an important step towards IACS Common Rules, and a confirmation that the DNV approach to this rule development has been the right one.

"We believe that our technical platform reflects state-of-the-art in ship-design technology and experience. Our new rules will give the industry the safe and robust tankers they are asking for. The challenge now is to ensure that the implementation is consistent throughout IACS," says Torhaug.