Emissions targets all at sea

Cars and trucks, coal-fired power stations, and belching cows. The usual suspects when it comes to discussions of carbon footprints and climate change. But, Greek researchers discuss, in the International Journal of Ocean Systems Management, just how important it is to understand carbon emissions from shipping.

Harilaos Psaraftis and Christos Kontovas of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), explain that emissions from commercial shipping have been the subject of intense scrutiny by the world shipping community despite the fact that it has escaped inclusion in the Kyoto protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – UNFCCC (1997). The ongoing meeting in Copenhagen (COP- 15) may see the issue of shipping emissions addressed more keenly, however.

“It is clear that the time of non-regulation is rapidly approaching its end,” Psaraftis and Kontovas say, “measures to curb future atmospheric carbon dioxide increases are being sought with a high degree of urgency. In parallel, the broader analysis of other greenhouse gases (such as methane and nitrous oxide) and other pollutants is already high on the International Maritime Organisation’s agenda.”

The team points out that there are many tools produced by various organisations and governmental agencies that offer online calculators for carbon footprint evaluation of different industrial activities. Airline companies too offer online tools for estimating the emissions associated with a given trip and the option to purchase carbon offsets against a journey.

Psaraftis and Kontovas have now developed a free online emissions calculator that computes various statistics for a given ship and operational scenario. This web tool is the first publicly available calculator for the shipping industry and uses genuine fuel consumption data obtained from ship owners rather than theoretical values based on power.

The calculator allows the user to choose ship type, size, route, trip distance, payload, ship’s unballasted weight, and operational details such as speed, fuel consumption, and time spent in ports loading and unloading. The tool then outputs various statistics on roundtrip emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides (NOx) in both absolute terms and emissions per tonne kilometre.

The calculator can be a useful tool for regulators, ship operators, shippers, and environmental groups, to analyze the carbon footprint of specific maritime transport alternatives. It can also be extended to examine more complex logistical scenarios, Psaraftis says.

The shipping emissions calculator was developed by the NTUA team for the Hellenic Chamber of Shipping (HCS) and can be found here – http://www.martrans.org/emis