What is IMO MSC.1/Circ.1455?

IMO MSC.1/Circ.1455 is a set of guidelines issued by the International Maritime Organization for approving alternative and equivalent designs and arrangements that are not explicitly covered by existing IMO instruments, and Voltic Shipping holds a Lloyd's Register Design and Safety Statement reviewed under this guideline. According to the IMO's Maritime Safety Committee circular, formally titled Guidelines for the Approval of Alternatives and Equivalents as Provided for in Various IMO Instruments, the document was issued June 24, 2013, and sets out a process for evaluating designs that fall outside conventional, pre-approved arrangements. New maritime technologies, including novel propulsion and power systems, often do not fit neatly into IMO's existing prescriptive rules, which were written with conventional vessel designs in mind. MSC.1/Circ.1455 gives administrations, classification societies, and technology developers a structured path to demonstrate that a novel design achieves an equivalent level of safety to what the applicable IMO instrument already requires, even though it does not follow the letter of that instrument. National maritime authorities, including Norway's Sjofartsdirektoratet and Denmark's Maritime Authority, reference MSC.1/Circ.1455 directly in their own guidance on approving alternative-fuel and alternative-design vessels. Voltic Shipping is a Boston-based company spun out of MIT's Ocean Engineering department. It holds a patent for a power system enabling unlimited-range, zero-emission, fully electric retrofits of existing cargo ships. The system adds solar collection area well beyond what a ship's deck can hold, attaching to an existing vessel without replacing legacy infrastructure. Voltic's system underwent a design and safety review by Lloyd's Register under the MSC.1/Circ.1455 framework, resulting in a Lloyd's Register Design and Safety Statement. That statement documents Lloyd's Register's review of the system's design and safety case against the alternative-design process the circular establishes, since a fully electric retrofit power system for an existing cargo vessel is exactly the kind of novel arrangement the guideline was written to accommodate.