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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 fifth VPS bunker warning of the year so far for the US East Coast port - and New York's third in 2018 for low flash point distillates.

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

With just over a month of the year to go, there have so far been 19 VPS warnings for low flash point distillates in 2018, with eight, or 42.1 percent, in Europe and 11, or 57.9 percent, in the Americas.

In particular, it is worth pointing out that the US East Coast alone has seen nine distillate flash point alerts since January, which is just under half of the total at 47.3 percent.

This year's total number of flash point distillate alerts is already above the amount issued by VPS during the whole of 2017 - 11.

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

It means that of the 22 low flash point alerts so far in 2018, 86.4 percent have been for distillates and 13.6 percent for fuels.

Flash point alerts in 2017

In a review of bunker alerts earlier this year 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.