Marine Fuel Book-and-claim Pilot to Launch Later This Year

Book-and-trade: untying administrative from physical flow of product. File Image / Pixabay.

A project to establish a book-and-claim system for shipping has been taken up by research outfit Rocky Mountain Institute.

RMI is hoping to launch a pilot of the scheme by the end of this year, according to its website.

A book-and-claim system follows a chain of custody model that separates the administrative flow of a product from its physical entity.

Such a system would allow the attributes of a fuel (eg its emission intensity) to decouple from the physical value chain yet still have the investment made to produce low-emission fuels.

Transactions of a digitalized version of a fuel's attributes could among other things, signal to fuel producers of the potential demand, channel cargo owners' premiums to support investments in retrofitting or changing fleets and provide attribute and transaction traceability to generate trust and enhance the system's acceptance, according to RMI.

"One of the main challenges is ensuring the right amount of trust among users and stakeholders," said Aparajit Pandey and Oscar Hernandez, who are working on the system.

"A great portion of the work for designing a book-and-claim system is determining the attributes that represent the physical flows and how to ensure that those are accurately collected by the system's users, in this case, shipowners, and operators," they said.

Pandey and Hernandez are working with partners Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping, Danish Shipping, and Maersk Oil Trading on the project. More information can be found on the RMI website.