Bunker “C” is foul stuff. We used to use it in several plants I worked in. It has to be heated before you can even pump it, it’s so thick. When burned properly, it does put out a lot of sulphur fumes, as it has so much sulphur in it.
As for causing deaths? Unless you are constantly inhaling thick fumes, it’s a rare, uncomfortable inconvenience to any other than those super-sensitized.
There is the whole “acidification” issue, mind you.
Bunker fuel is nasty. Burning it produces prodigious quantities of H2S, which is deadly at levels below 100 PPM.
Requiring shipping companies to use cleaner fuels such as diesel or LNG, all of a sudden the costs to ship goods from China to the US helps level the playing field without tariffs. Win - win.
Let the Enviro’s help us for a change!
When I was in the USN, I spent a week or so on the USS Lexington out of Pensacola...she was on her last legs as a training ship, so she was in pretty lousy shape.
It was damned awful. Bunker fuel fumes inundated the compartment I was sleeping in...I could taste it, it made me nauseous, the food tasted like bunker fuel...I couldn’t sleep. Ever try to sleep when you are really sick with a bad fever, and the best you can get is a subdued wakefulness? It was like that.
It was as if the tanks were venting directly into the compartment I was in.
Ugh. I was never so happy to get off a ship as I as I was to get off the Lexington. It wasn’t the crew’s fault, this was the late Seventies and I guess they just didn’t have enough money to keep her maintained well.
I wonder if this is the stuff that was in a huge tank behind my house next to the railroad when I was growing up in the 1950’s. It was for the steam engines before diesels in Oregon.
The industry is going to low sulfur fuel oil.