SEA-LNG Backs Both EU and IMO on Maritime GHG Emissions

The EU has moved ahead of the IMO's global approach in seeking to tackle maritime GHG emissions. File Image / Pixabay

LNG bunker industry body SEA-LNG has backed the European Union's approach to addressing shipping's greenhouse gas emissions at the regional level, while hoping for progress at the global level from the IMO.

The organisation supports the European Commission's plans, but would prefer new regulations to be set at the global level by the IMO, it said in an emailed statement this week. SEA-LNG 'particularly welcomes' the EU's goal of calculating the GHG emissions intensity of marine fuels on a well-to-wake basis, it said.

The IMO has traditionally been hostile to attempts to regulate shipping's emissions at the EU level, seeing them as potentially undermining the work of seeking global consensus.

"We recognise that the proposed basket of measures relating to the maritime sector is supportive in principle of LNG and the decarbonization pathway it offers through bioLNG and, ultimately, renewable synthetic LNG, which is derived from the same hydrogen base as other alternative fuels," the organisation said in the statement.

But the organisation also laid out the following concerns about the EU's approach:

• "First, the methodology for calculating the emissions performance for different maritime fuels in FuelEU Maritime may be unworkable as it proposes different approaches for renewable and low-carbon alternative fuels and fossil fuels.

• Second, the absence of a Guarantee of Origin system in RED III.  This will tend to undermine market liquidity and hinder the ramp-up of renewable gases such as biomethane and synthetic methane (e-methane) and their liquefied equivalents bioLNG and synthetic LNG (e-LNG) in RED III.

• Third, the focus on tank-to-wake emissions only in the revision to EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).  The full life cycle must be considered.  Restricting the analysis to tank-to-wake may lead to renewable and low carbon fuels being severely disadvantaged against fuels such as ammonia and hydrogen, if they are produced outside the EU from fossil fuels."