Building shipping industry pressure requires building engine pressure

Beginning in Paris on Thursday, The Summit of the New Global Financing Pact is spearheaded by Emanuel Macron and marks a colossal effort to reach an inter-governmental agreement on issues relating to multilateral development bank reform, the debt crisis, innovative financing, and international taxes.

One such international tax that the Summit will deal with relates to an emissions levy on global shipping. With the UN’s International Maritime Organisation due to meet in two weeks’ time, Macron’s Summit is expected to pressure the IMO to tax the emissions of global shipping to draw additional revenue necessary to fund the transition while decarbonising an industry that represents close to 3% of emissions globally.

Macron is right to want shipping to decarbonise, however such a levy must come with the appropriate recommendations if the industry is to be successful in its aims without significantly increasing the cost of the day-to-day trade of goods that are essential to sustaining the global economy.

To date, the conversation around decarbonising shipping has been dominated by the prospect of switching to alternative fuels, which include ammonia, methane, methanol, and hydrogen. Adopting any of these presents its own unique challenge to overcome. These include adapting existing ships to store fuels in particular conditions, in addition to scaling the production of alternative fuels to an industrial level – it may take decades before we have an industrial output large enough of any alternative fuels to sustain the global shipping industry at its current level. Moreover, ship operators are preparing for a transitional period by ordering ships with dual fuel engines. Accelleron estimates, based on latest figures that by 2025 60% of orders will be dual fuel engines.

Alternative and future fuels will be and should be used once their production infrastructure is at the right scale, however conventional marine fuel oil will continue to be used at some level until this point. In this scenario, the most effective means of reducing emissions comes from drastically improving energy efficiency.

Shipping’s answer to energy efficiency already exists for today: turbochargers. A turbocharger acts as an extension to a conventional marine propulsion engine that forces air through a combustion chamber at a higher pressure and can improve an engine’s performance by up to 300% while reducing fuel consumption by up to 10% and C02 emissions by 20%.

As future fuels replace fuel oil that ships use today are estimated to be 2 to 3 times more expensive than today’s fossil fuels, the role of turbochargers will become even more important. This applies both to the importance of saving costs by improving turbocharger efficiency, but also to the application of more fuel-efficient turbocharging systems such as flexible cut-out.

Turbochargers, such as Accelleron’s low-speed X300-L series are designed with both these long- and short-term needs in mind. In the short-term, the X300 series reduces emissions by providing the highest efficiency levels in the industry and in the mid- to long term it provides the flexibility for component upgrades tailored to needs of future fuels and enhanced turbocharger cut-out options.

Reducing the environmental impact of maritime transport is imperative, however a levy on shipping emissions must be implemented with guidance by offering solutions that exist, such as turbochargers, fuel injection and digital solutions that have the potential to drastically lower emissions in the short-term while improving energy efficiency. Such a levy should empower industry to change, not scare it into an ill-informed leap into the unknown