Page 14: of Marine News Magazine (December 2015)

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INSIGHTS are good, but we need to pace ourselves on regulations to allow the technology to come up with better and more practical ways to meet them. I believe we are in a transition

Guido Perla period and it is very dif? cult to make decisions and advise our clients as to what the best solution is to meet these new regulations and laws. These new regulations are promoting

Chairman, or requiring the use of alternative fuels. One major compo-

GPA, Inc.

nent of this issue is that LNG, for example, is an alterna- tive that volumetrically is signi? cantly less ef? cient to store uido Perla is the Chairman of the Seattle-based and handle as standard fuels and make the vessels larger

Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering ? rm to accommodate these new requirements. Thus, you need larger vessels to do the same work using alternatives fu-

GPA. Mr. Perla, born and raised in Colombia, ob-

G tained a BSE in Mechanical Engineering from University els. That implies more power, more fuel, larger equipment

Ponti? cia Bolivariana in Colombia. After graduation, he and investment. We are working on developing designs to comply with these new regulations and alternative fuels. It worked for a shipyard in Barranquilla, before leaving Co- lombia in 1971 to attend the University of Michigan to is not the most practical but it is what we have available. receive a BSE in Naval Architecture. His ? rst employer in We need to be smart in trying to do the best we can with the technology and options presented to us. In terms of the U.S. was Jacksonville Shipyards in Jacksonville, Flor- ida, and in 1974, he went to work for Rockport Yacht & labor rules, changes like the implementation of MLC 2006

Supply in Rockport, Texas, where he completed his ? rst have a similar effect on vessel design by expanding the size

PSV design, a vessel type that was to become particularly of accommodation structures for a given crew size. This is certainly a good thing for the crew, and should foster important to him, and to the company that he was to lat- er form. The one-man company has since evolved into a more comfortable conditions and ideally a crew who can operate a vessel more effectively and ef? ciently – but there multi-disciplinary naval architecture and marine engineer- ing ? rm, headquartered in Seattle, WA, with subsidiaries are also losses in the fact that a given ship now must carry around more steel. Many of these changes in regulations in Brazil, Chile, China and Germany. GPA provides ser- vices worldwide in different marine sectors. Mr. Perla is promote bigger ships to carry out a task that could have responsible for the strategic development of the company, been done before by a smaller vessel. There are bene? ts in and focuses on preliminary and conceptual design work. all of these rules, but the cost is that now everyone must consume more power than before to complete a given task.

His take on naval architecture today is therefore particu- larly valuable. Listen in as he provides his perspective on

Give us your assessment of the boatbuilding markets the industry today.

here in the U.S. today.

The decline of the oil price has created a large prob-

What is the biggest design variable impacting the lem in areas related to the oil exploration and production newbuild and/or retro? t markets today? Why?

Environmental regulations and labor rules. I believe both (E&P) industry and other sectors. If the predictions are

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