Retrofitting existing ships huge challenge in decarbonisation: Stopford

Dr Stopford notes that demand the World Bank forecasts the world’s population will grow by 24% by 2050 from 8 billion in 2021, which means a growing carbon emission burden. It is also likely to lead to growing demand for the services of the shipping industry. 

Rather than forecasting the growth in global trade over the coming 30 years, Stopford presented four scenarios for global trade growth. In the first, trade would grow by 3.5% per year and emissions from shipping would reach 28.4 billion tonnes. This, however, he described as unlikely. At a 2.0% annual trade growth emissions would reach 21.4 billion tonnes and if global trade only grew by 0.8%, the emissions would still amount to 15 billion tonnes in 2050. With lacklustre growth at first and gentle, sustained decline after that the emissions would amount to 11.3 billion tonnes in 2050, a slight reduction from 2021.

Retrofitting existing ships with fuel saving technologies will be one of the challenges that the industry will meet when it works its way towards decarbonisation. There are about 24,000 ship owning companies in the world at the moment and some 13,000 of them only have one vessel. Given the fact that freight markets are quite volatile, a major question is whether these owners will have the resources to make the necessary investments, Stopford noted in a presentation at Marintec in Shangahi in September. 

There will also be a significant “green energy gap” as the production of green fuels is unlikely to keep up with demand growth from the second half of this decade onwards, when the supply of fossil fuels is expected to start to decline, he said, referring to scenarios presented by BP. 

Investment needed in skilled staff and technology

A ship owner needs to be able to monitor the development of emissions from its ships and to reduce them, optimal performance of systems onboard is important. “Many owners do not have the staff to do this, they do not have the technical support any more,” he told The Motorship.

It would be necessary to employ people with skills to decipher data collected onboard by various devices, but many companies do not have staff with such high IT competence levels. And even ones that do can find themselves in a situation that they have no access to it as some data are proprietary to the manufacturer of a device.

Consequently, the need to invest in energy saving technologies will increase the need to invest in people that have the right skills to ensure that the investment in hardware produces the desired results, yet bearing in mind the caveat regarding access to data.

Assuming that global trade will grow by 0.8% per year up to 2050, some ships built before the year 2020 would remain in service up to 2045. The propulsion system on these is based on diesel technology as is that one the first wave of vessels completed after 2020 that Stopford forecasts to trade up to the second half of the 2040s.

From the middle of this decade, wave 2 intermediate technology vessels will start entering service followed by zero carbon wave 3 vessels that will start to emerge soon after the second wave.

The fact that ships based on diesel technology are expected to remain in service for more than two decades from now highlights the need to upgrade existing vessels with energy saving technologies. However, the highly cyclical nature of shipping freight markets means that the main focus of ship owners lies in riding these cycles – it does not lie in technology or innovation.

“You need entrepreneurs, people who make things work, young engineers who can work at home and at the office and who understand digital,” Stopford said. Although there is a lot of discussion about unmanned ships that may operate on the oceans in the future, the most crucial challenge that the shipping industry faces is not technology, but people.

Innovation is crucial for any industry to meet any challenge and the one that the shipping industry is facing today is no different. While the industry needs entrepreneurial people, they should also be prepared to meet obstacles.

“[When] Alfred Holt decided to use the type of boiler used in locomotives that worked at a pressure of 100 pounds per square inch on his ships, rather than [the] ones working at 10 pounds that was the norm in shipping… the government tried to stop him,” Stopford said, referring to a British shipowner in the 1860s.

As the demand for green energy is likely to outstrip supply in the near future and ultimately the production of fossil fuels will peak, nuclear power could be an option that the shipping industry needs to think about in order to reach the IMO’s decarbonisation targets, Stopford concluded.