On the attitudes and opportunities of fuel consumption monitoring and measurement within the shipping industry and the identification and validation of energy efficiency and performance interventions

In the past few years, energy efficiency has received increasing attention in the shipping industry. On the one hand, the introduction of environmental regulations such as the Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) and the Ship Energy Efficiency Management Plan (SEEMP) is driving an increase in energy efficiency. On the other hand, with bunker fuel often representing around 60-70% of many ships’ operating costs and at sustained high bunker prices, increasing energy efficiency can result in considerable costs savings. Measurement of fuel consumption is an important component in energy efficiency management, and yet there is little work to date quantifying the measurement techniques currently used in the industry and the applications of these techniques

Noon report data uncertainty

Noon report data is a low resolution dataset (sampling frequency of approximately 24 hours) from which it is possible to extract the principal variables required to define the ship’s performance in terms of fuel consumption. There are increasing economic and environmental incentives for ship owners and operators to develop tools to optimise operational decisions with the aim of reducing fuel consumption and/or maximising profit. Further, a ships current performance needs to be measured in order for fuel savings from technological interventions to be assessed. These tools and measurements may be based on models developed from historical trends that are extracted from noon reports; however there is inherent uncertainty in this dataset. As a prerequisite the uncertainty must be quantified to understand fully the potential and limitations of predictive models from which operational tools may be designed and of statistical models from which technological interventions are assessed. This paper initially presents a method for quantifying the uncertainty in reported fuel consumption using between two months and one year’s worth of data from 89 ships. The subsequently calculated confidence is then compared to the uncertainty in the data acquired from an on board continuous monitoring system

A framework to evaluate hydrogen as fuel in international shipping

The shipping industry is today challenged by tighter regulations on efficiency, air pollution and the need to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The decarbonisation of the global energy system could be achieved with the use of alternative energy and fuels, and so a widespread switch to the adoption of alternative fuel in shipping could be experienced within the coming decades. Lately, many scenarios of alternative fuels in shipping have been investigated. Among the options of alternative fuels with different propulsion technologies, hydrogen with marine fuel cells (FCs) represent an example of such an alternative fuel. This paper proposes a framework to examine a possible transition path for the use of hydrogen in shipping within the context of decarbonisation of the wider global energy system. The framework is based on a soft- linking the global integrated assessment model (TIAM-UCL) and the shipping model (GloTraM). Initial results from this work-in-progress describe the trajectories of hydrogen prices, the characteristic of the hydrogen fleet and the consequences for shipping CO2 emissions, the hydrogen infrastructure requirements, the use of hydrogen in other sectors, and the consequences for global energy system CO2 emissions

Global Marine Fuel Trends 2030

Global Marine Fuel Trends 2030 central objective is to unravel the landscape of fuels used by commercial shipping over the next 16 years. The problem has many dimensions: a fuel needs to be available, cost-effective, compatible with existing and future technology and compliant with current and future environmental requirements. In a way, one cannot evaluate the future of marine fuels without evaluating the future of the marine industry. And the future of the marine industry itself is irrevocably linked with the global economic, social and political landscape to 2030

The promise and limits of private standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from shipping

This article examines private standards that aim to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in shipping. These have emerged against a backdrop of regulatory inertia and the exclusion of international shipping from the Paris Climate Change Agreement. They are a product of complex governance arrangements and they have addressed areas of market failure that have held back fuel efficiency advances that are made possible by technological innovations. These private standards hold considerable promise but suffer to different degrees from certain weaknesses, notably a lack of transparency, a low level of ambition and concerns about data reliability. This article examines these deficiencies together with the reasons for them, and assesses the role that law could play in addressing them. It argues that the conditions may be present for the mitigation of shipping’s GHG emissions to become a site of ‘hybrid’ governance, combining private standards and state/supra-state law in a productive way

Stranded assets and the shipping industry

According to IMO forecasts, CO2 emissions from world shipping could double by the year 2050. Although shipping is in most cases the most efficient mode of transport per unit of transport supply, it is still heavily reliant on heavy fuel oil to power its propulsion. The IMO has introduced regulations to bring about reductions in the emissions of ships, including an Energy Efficiency Design Index which sets a mandatory CO2 intensity reduction target for new ships and imposing a sulphur regulation on ships operating in certain sea areas. At the same time, charterers are beginning to factor energy efficiency into their commercial decision-making through use of the EVDI (an approximation of EEDI). Exemplifying this trend, Cargill, Huntsman and UNIPEC UK publically announced in October 2012 that they would no longer charter the least efficient ships in the fleet. This regulatory environment, along with the uncertainty in energy prices and increased awareness of the industry’s carbon footprint, poses a threat to existing ships’ profitability and may result in certain ships becoming stranded assets. The objective of this paper is to identify the supply and demand-side risk factors contributing to existing ships becoming stranded assets, and to frame how an assessment could be carried out on the risk of stranded assets in the shipping industry

Analysis techniques for evaluating the fuel savings associated with wind assistance

Before steam and diesel engines, all cargo merchant ships were propelled by wind power. The arrival of cheap, high-density energy sources such as coal and oil and the economic benefits of the service speed and reliability that this enabled removed wind as a form of propulsion for much of the 20th century. However, higher prices for these energy commodities and environmental regulation, has led some to speculate that wind could return once again as a source of at least some share of a modern merchant ship’s propulsion energy requirement. A number of proposals for the technology that could enable this exist (e.g. soft-sails, wingsails and flettners), all share in common difficulties in their fair assessment, both relative to each other and relative to a conventionally powered ship. A moderately sized rig can supply anywhere between 0-100% of a merchant ship’s propulsion requirements, but this varies as a function of wind speed and direction, which in turn could vary several times a day over the course of multiple-day voyage. The weather, its variability and the specifics of a ship’s route are therefore all key components that render simpler ‘generic’ energy savings assessments meaningless. Furthermore, whilst conventional ships might sail a shortest distance route that avoids extreme weather, a wind-assisted ship might undertake more extreme variation in route and speed over the course of the voyage to maximize benefit obtained from the wind, and this in turn therefore needs to be taken into account in a fair comparison. This paper describes an analysis process that can be applied to any ship design and wind-assistance technology, to fairly evaluate the performance over a range of conditions, and then simulate the performance on a specific voyage using historical records of metocean parameters. The process is applied to an example design to illustrate the method

Policy implications of meeting the 2C climate target

The inherently global nature of shipping has (certainly in the past half century) dictated the regulation of the shipping sector. Both the IMO and the ICS have affirmed their position that the regulation of shipping must, first and foremost, be the responsibility of agents at the global multilateral level. One interpretation of this is that shipping should be viewed akin to a sovereign nation in its own right. This position has significant implications for the responsibility of the sector as a whole in responding to the challenges posed by climate change. In the first instance, both the IMO and the ICS have established that the shipping industry is committed to its responsibility for reducing its carbon emissions, however it is also asserted that any response must be proportionate to shipping’s share of the total global emissions. Mitigating against dangerous climate change has conventionally been associated with maintaining temperature rise at least under a 2°C threshold, and that framing is also used in this paper. Scenarios of future shipping greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions suggest that under current policy, shipping emissions are expected to rise significantly – by 50 to 250% (IMO 3rd GHG study, 2014). This paper follows from the work of Smith et al (2015) presented in MEPC 68 that explores alternatives to the current expectations of shipping’s CO2. The shipping system model GloTraM is used to generate future scenarios up to 2050 under current policy, an imposed bunker levy, and under a cap and trade emission trading scheme with the cap set to shipping achieving a consistent proporition of the overall 2°C emission budget. The impact of these different scenarios on fuel mix, technology, EEOI and carbon price is then explored