INTERVIEW: NAPA Sees Growing Demand for GHG Management Services

Ossi Mettälä is product manager at NAPA Shipping Solutions. Image Credit: NAPA

Maritime software and data services firm NAPA is seeing evolving demand from the shipping industry for emissions management solutions as regulators including the EU tighten their regulations.

The firm has seen growing interest in recent months from shipping companies seeking to develop a more advanced strategy, Ossi Mettälä, product manager at NAPA Shipping Solutions, said in an interview with Ship & Bunker.

Finland-based NAPA is split into three entities: NAPA Design Solutions, providing software for shipyards, naval architects and ship designers, NAPA Safety Solutions, focused on the passenger vessel market, and NAPA Shipping Solutions, providing weather routing solutions and performance analytics.

"Traditionally the shipping industry has been quite slow on accepting and implementing new technologies, and this is still quite visible, especially on the merchant vessel side, where the reporting is quite often done through Excel sheets, email attachments and so forth, which is a practice that might work on paper but in reality is very time-consuming," Mettälä said.

"It's quite error-prone, it doesn't give any insight or forecast on what would be your fleet or vessel's - if we are talking about FuelEU Maritime - compliance balance, whether you're a deficit or a surplus vessel, but also not providing any insight on what would be the strategy to take to be compliant.

"What would be the cost of bunkering biofuels, pooling, borrowing or banking compliance, et cetera, or just simply paying the penalties.

"With more traditional Excel-based approaches, you're basically sailing blind."

Emissions Reduction

A range of solutions are available to deliver a better approach.

"If we're focusing on FuelEU Maritime, you can directly reduce the emissions, thus reducing the penalties," he said.

"But then there's the other side, which comes from the NAPA Fleeti Intelligence performance monitoring solutions where we have the FuelEU Maritime module where we facilitate basically the whole reporting pipeline for our customers.

"From the vessels, we can provide interfaces for the captains to do the reporting.

"We transfer the data shoreside, do the analysis and then provide the data directly to the verifiers.

"We basically take that pipeline and on top of it produce calculations, dashboards, forecasts on what would be the exposed penalty by the end of the year, but also help them on finding strategies, how to manage the risks related to FuelEU Maritime.

"For example, through internal pooling you can create or automate systems on creating pools within your own vessels.

"And if external pooling is of interest, then we also have partnerships with Ahti Climate on that."

Emissions can be cut by as much as 10% in some cases.

"The savings, of course, come from various sources, like the reduced administrative work, which is harder to quantify in practice," Mettälä said.

"But this is something that our customers see in real life all the time, how the error rate of the reporting is reducing, how the effort put into each new report generated is significantly reduced because we are producing those automatically.

"The more direct savings usually come from NAPA Voyage Optimisation.

"It's very case-specific, depending on what you're comparing to and what kind of operation the vessels are doing, but usually we can talk about between two, three, or up to ten percent, sometimes even more, depending on what the baseline we're comparing to is."

EU Deadlines Focus Minds

The increasing focus of the EU on shipping's emissions over time is helping to drive demand for services that can deliver lower compliance costs, Mettälä said.

"It has been picking up over the past couple of months, significantly, maybe because of the approaching deadline," he said.

"The customers are recognising that, 'Hey, we might be a bit late on FuelEU Maritime, but still we have to react to that'.

"We're getting more and more enquiries from customers.

"It seems like European operators are a bit more awake on this topic, and if we look at the APAC area, they are just waking up and recognising that this is not only a mandatory reporting requirement, but also something that will directly impact the bottom line of the operation."

The firm recently hosted a FuelEU Maritime seminar in Tokyo with Skuld that was overbooked within days.

Demand for NAPA's services helping with emissions has traditionally come from the container and cruise segments, but tankers, bulk carriers and other segments are now catching up, Mettälä said.

"There is no specific segment now that's not aware of this regulation," he said.

"Interestingly also the LNG carriers, even though they are carrying LNG and will be until 2030 surplus vessels, they're already looking at what would be their strategy.

"Do they start to bank now the overcompliance, or do they start engaging with external pooling and find a little bit of extra revenue streams from that?"

IMO Delay

The firm has also not seen the IMO's delay to its net-zero framework plans denting enthusiasm for its services.

"Decarbonisation is an increasingly important driver for global shipping, so it's not only an EU focus, even though they seem to be the only ones who are actively engaging on regulations on that front," Mettälä said. 

"However, we will soon be getting started with the UK-ETS, as well as Turkey looking for a similar scheme and others globally.

"The IMO delay to put the net-zero framework into force is most likely leading global shipping into more of a patchwork of regulations, more national regulations.

"It will take more time to get global regulations in place.

"But if that's the future that we're seeing, it will just add up to more administrative headaches for the operators.

"And I hate to say it, but for solution providers like us it might be an opportunity business-wise.

"But I would personally much prefer it if we would have the global net-zero framework in place."