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Veritas Petroleum Services (VPS) has issued a bunker alert for the port of New York relating to the supply of distillates with a low flash point.

It is the fourth VPS bunker warning of the year so far for the US east coast port - and New York's second in 2018 for low flash point distillates.

It also comes a little more than a couple of weeks after the highly abrasive fuels alert sent out by VPS for New York earlier this month.

The latest development follows other low flash point distillate alerts by VPS in 2018 for Bahia Blanca, Bergen, Bilbao, Corpus Christi, Le Havre, Miami (2), Skaw, Philadelphia (3), Tallinn and Venice (in addition to the two for New York).

With just over eight-and-a-half months of the year gone, there have so far been 15 VPS warnings for low flash point distillates in 2018, with six, or 40 percent, in Europe and nine, or 60 percent, in the Americas.

The total number of flash point distillate alerts is already above the amount issued by VPS during the whole of last year - 11.

There have also been two low flash point warnings for residual fuels (plus one update) this year - both of them in Singapore.

It means that of the 17 low flash point alerts so far in 2018, 88.2 percent have been for distillates and 11.8 percent for fuels.

Flash point alerts in 2017

In a recent review of bunker alerts by VPS's Group Commercial & Business Development Director, Steve Bee, flash point was by far the most common quality issue for distillates last year, with 11 alerts, or 50 percent of all worldwide distillate warnings.

Of the 12 global flash point alerts issued in 2017, 11 were for distillates and only one for residual fuels.

Europe was the region to record the highest number of VPS distillate bunker alerts in 2017 with 14 warnings - or 63.6 percent of global distillate alerts.

VPS issued six flash point alerts for Europe in 2017, which represented half of all global warnings relating to flash point - with the other half flagged up in the Americas.