Carnival To Spend Up To $400 Million on Expanded Clean-Air Program

"MIAMI — Carnival Corp. will announce Thursday that it is expanding a clean-air program it announced last year, more than doubling the number of ships that will have exhaust cleaning systems installed - at roughly double the price.

That means the Doral-based cruise giant will place the 'scrubber' technology it has been developing on at least 70 ships at a cost of up to $400 million. The dual filtration and scrubbing systems are expected to be installed on ships in six of the parent company's brands over the next three years.

'We're now far enough along in the research and development and we have a few of the initial scrubbers installed,' said Tom Dow, Carnival's vice president of public affairs, in an interview Wednesday. 'It's given us enough confidence to say we want to roll this out even more broadly.'

In September, Carnival said it would spend more than $180 million on new technology that would clean fuel exhaust on 32 of its ships in order to meet air-pollution standards for waters off North American coasts going into effect in 2015."

Hannah Sampson reports for the Miami Herald May 22, 2014.