Current Technologies Can Reduce Ship Emissions More Than 75% by 2050: Marintek

Marintek said there was "a large number of practical and economically feasible combinations of measures" that would result in a significant reductions in emissions. Image Credit - Marintek

Current technologies can reduce Shipping's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions more than 75 percent by 2050, a new study from Norway's Marintek has concluded.

"State-of-the-art technologies, measures, and potential for reducing GHG emissions from shipping – A review" reached its conclusions by reviewing around 150 previous studies of fuel and CO2 emissions reduction measures that had been published after the second GHG study of the IMO.

Focus was on the reported results and not on the methods used, Marintek noted.

Six groups of measures believed to have high mitigation potential were selected and used to sort and compare the selected studies: hull design; economy of scale; power and propulsion (including energy saving devices); speed; fuels and alternative energy sources; weather routing and scheduling.

"Significant reduction potentials can be achieved by swift adoption and combination of a large number of individual measures, as no single measure is sufficient by itself. It is possible to reduce GHG emissions by a factor of 4 to 6 per freight unit transported based on current technologies within 2050," said study author Dr Elizabeth Lindstad from the Norwegian Marine Technology Research Institute.

"The success of these measures is also dependent on the growth rates of maritime transport. Policies, regulations, and legislation, such as the EEDI, can facilitate reduction of GHG emissions by the sector, but successful implementation has to be supported by high-quality studies addressing multiple effects and measures simultaneously in order to avoid counteracting and inefficient adoption of mitigation measures."

One such area the study said warranted further examination was the climate effects of a shift from HFO to LNG.

"The interplay between reduced SO2 emissions, reduced CO2 emissions, and fugitive methane emissions are not well understood," it said.

For the record, the study acknowledged that the "highly theoretical" sum of all the reduction technologies (providing a reduction of over 99 percent) would not be possible in the real world as many were either mutually exclusive or unusable due to their interdependency with other measures.

Still, Marintek said there was nevertheless "a large number of practical and economically feasible combinations of measures" that would yield the desired results.

"One of these combinations would be: Vessel size; Hull shape; Ballast water reduction; Hull coating; Hybrid power/propulsion; Propulsion efficiency devices; Speed optimization and Weather routing. Assuming relatively large independence between the individual measures, combining these options can lead to emission reductions of 78% based on 3rd quartile values, 55% based on the median, and 29% based on 1st quartile values," the study concluded.

Image Credit: Marintek