UK CCC: Reducing CO2 emissions from UK international shipping requires measures “beyond” EEDI - Increasing energy efficiency in shipping

Posted - April 7, 2012 -   Increasing energy efficiency in shipping 

The UK Committee on Climate Change (CCC) just released their report “Scope of carbon budgets – Statutory advice on inclusion of international aviation and shipping”, on how and why to include international shipping and aviation in UK carbon budgets.
How to allocate emissions in such a way that it is possible to define “UK international shipping” is not entirely trivial. I’ll post some implications for Sweden, where only domestic shipping emissions are included in the CO2 accounting, later. Meanwhile, some interesting details regarding future CO2 emissions from international shipping accountable to the UK can be found. Specifically, we see scenarios where emissions from shipping are reduced, contrary to previous assessments on international shipping, for example as discussed in a below post. The following graph (on p. 41, Figure 3.4) details three different scenarios:
In the high emissions scenario the authors assume that measures do not go beyond the Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) (the Ship Energy Efficiency Management Plan (SEEMP) is not mentioned). In the central scenario, speed reductions, size increases, and limited biofuel use, are also included. In the low emission scenario, “strong policy action to incentivise full take-up of abatement potential from technological and operational measures”, further increases in ship size, and increased biofuel use are assumed.
The impact of such measures are in the same range as that projected by others earlier. The reason as to why the UK can see a decrease in emissions is probably that the scenarios are based on a flat demand scenario–annual growth in transportation work (tonnes-miles) is estimated to range from -0.1% and 0.1%, depending on carbon price. This is a substantially different demand than that typically assumed for international shipping. In the IMO 2nd GHG report, demand growth is rather projected to range from 0.9% in a low growth scenario to 5.4% in a high growth scenario. (p. 95, Table 7.7).

About the author

Hannes Johnson is a PhD student and Project Manager at Shipping and Marine Technology, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
He is part of the research group Maritime Environment, where research is conducted in the fields of Resource Efficiency, Environmental Impact, and Organization and Policy.
Hannes has a M.Sc. in Engineering Physics and Industrial Ecology from Chalmers 2008. Please contact him at:
hannes.johnson@chalmers.se

• Recent publications

  2012Johnson, Hannes; Johansson, Mikael; Andersson, Karin: Barriers to energy efficiency in short sea shipping: a case study. Short Sea Shipping 2012 Conference, Lisbon,
  2011Englund, Oskar; Berndes, Göran; Johnson, Hannes; Ostwald, Madelene: Environmental Impact Assessments: Suitable for supporting assessments of biofuel sustainability?. Göteborg : Chalmers University of Technology.
  Englund, Oskar; Berndes, Göran; Johnson, Hannes: Recent progress in developing renewable energy sources and technical evaluation of the use of biofuels and other renewable fuels in transport in accordance with Article 3 of Directive 2001/77/EC and Article 4(2) of Directive 2003/30/EC. Brussels : European Commission.
  Johnson, Hannes; Andersson, Karin: The energy efficiency gap in shipping - barriers to improvement. International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME) Conference

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