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Something in the Air
Green shoppers may try to limit the air-miles of
supermarket vegetables, but few of us are likely to check things like
origin of garden furniture to reduce our sea-miles. The container ship
is by far the most efficient cog in our global, vertically-integrated
freight network and, whether we are aware of it or not, both prices and
our consumer attitudes reflect this.
Globalisation has been vastly accelerated by the ability to shift
bulk cheaply around the world; it has changed the way the world lives,
shops and the kind of jobs we do. With almost 90% of goods traded across
borders being transported by ship, the industry currently only produces
around only 15% of global freight CO2 emissions – which would appear to
be a pretty decent trade-off.
The International Association of Independent Tanker Owners
(Intertanko) produced a 2007 confidential report for the United Nations
International Maritime Organisation (IMO). Using 2001 figures,
Intertanko estimated current global shipping emissions at over one
billion tonnes per year. By comparison, the heavily-regulated and taxed
global aviation industry currently produces an estimated 650 million
tonnes per year.
Despite the downturn in world trade since 2008, a 2012 report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc. predicts the global merchant shipping tonnage will reach 12.4 million metric tons by 2015. Elsewhere, maritime emissions are widely predicted to rise by 40 – 50% overall by 2020; thus whatever happens within the industry now has the potential for much wider impacts in the future. So why does shipping appear to remain immune from global efforts to reduce carbon emissions?
In December 2011, Allan Graveson, Senior National Secretary of the UK
Climate Change Committee (CCC) told the British shipping industry
journal Telegraphthat:
Plain Sailing?
The idea that ships represent a clean and efficient method of shifting bulk freight apparently extends from the consumer up to the legislature. Whilst international climate change agreements have seen nations scramble to reduce land-based emissions from cars, road-haulage and industry; ship emissions have remained largely unregulated. Shipping was not included in the original Kyoto Protocol; it does not figure in current EU greenhouse gas emission figures; it is not included in the European Emissions Trading Scheme (at the time of writing), nor in national EU carbon emission calculations. For decades the industry has been treated as if we were still in the age of sail.
Global shipping lanes graphed by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.
Despite the downturn in world trade since 2008, a 2012 report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc. predicts the global merchant shipping tonnage will reach 12.4 million metric tons by 2015. Elsewhere, maritime emissions are widely predicted to rise by 40 – 50% overall by 2020; thus whatever happens within the industry now has the potential for much wider impacts in the future. So why does shipping appear to remain immune from global efforts to reduce carbon emissions?
Burn Baby Burn
Economies of scale have a great deal to do with the low costs of shipping, but the another reason is the cheap, low-quality fuel used in the engine room. Since the 1970s nearly all commercial and naval shipping has run on one type of oil, Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) generically known as bunker fuel, coined after the containers on ships and in ports that it is stored in. It is a viscous by-product of the oil refining process. In 2007, an ‘industry insider’ described this Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) to the UK’s Independent newspaper as:“The crap that comes out the other end that’s half-way to being asphalt.”
Diesel Fuel & Bunker Fuel comparison
HFO is a thick, black and tarry substance which is banned for combustion on land within the EU and is now almost completely phased-out as a fuel in US power stations (even with emission scrubbers). Combusting HFO in an engine is the norm for shipping however, where it must be pre-heated to 104 – 127 °C in order to get it to flow into the engine and burn.“Shipping is unique in that it burns the waste product of the oil refining process – heavy fuel oil. It would be better for the planet if this form of asphalt was put into roads.”
Bunker fuel contains approximately 4,500 times the sulphur content of
road fuel. Sulphur dioxide is released in the exhaust fumes of ships,
it is an acidic gas formed by the oxidation of sulphur impurities in HFO
during the combustion process. It lingers in the atmosphere and
generates sulphuric acid, which in turn promotes ocean acidification as
well as deforestation, soil and water damage and biodiversity loss
through acid rain. Nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide are also produced
in huge amounts, both powerful greenhouse gasses (GHGs).
Bunker fuel also generates disproportionate amounts of Particulate Matter (PM) in the form of various sulphur oxides and black carbon which is carcinogenic to the mammalian cardiovascular system.
The very long-chain hydrocarbons in bunker fuel do not burn as easily as the short ones found in domestic fuel, resulting in incomplete combustion. These tiny particles of soot and sulphuric acid are 500 times as fine as a human hair and so can be windborne many miles inland from the smokestack, where they can lodge in the lung and are near impossible for the human body to remove.
Modern container ships have 100,000+ horsepower engines weighing over 2,500 tons that operate 24hrs a day for an average of 280 days a year. An average 13,000-container vessel will combust about 250 tons of fuel a day. HFO has around 4,500 times the sulphur content of domestic diesel, so that one container ship typically generates about 5,000 tonnes of sulphur per year. This is particularly important for those living around coastal areas and ports as around 70% of ship emissions occur within 400km of land, arguably rendering the Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) land-ban redundant.
In 2005 Defra estimated the health impact of PM costs the UK between £8.5 billion and £20.2 billion per year. In late 2010 the Government advisory body Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants, published a report on the mortality effects of long-term exposure to PMs in the UK. It concluded that PMs contributed to the early deaths of up to 200,000 people in 2008 alone.
In 2008 a study by the US Scripps Institution of Oceanography revealed that black smoke from ships contributed as much as 44% of the sulphate found in fine particulate matter in the atmosphere of coastal California. An earlier study had found shipping emissions amounted to half of the smog-related sulphur dioxide in Los Angeles.
In 2010 the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) acted decisively upon research like this by designating a 230-mile wide shipping emission buffer zone of 0.1% sulphur off the entire North American coastline, declaring it an ‘Emission Control Area’ (ECA).
This unilateral ship-emission buffer zone is predicted to save $330bn
per year in US health costs from treating lung and heart diseases
alone, Canada has since followed suit.
However in Europe we presently have a scenario where international environmental targets mean land-based emissions from relatively clean-burning fuels are falling just as highly-polluting ship-based emissions are rising. The net result of this apparent lack of understanding is that, despite all the legislation for air quality and carbon-footprint reduction on land, coastal air quality within the EU has been dropping.
By 2020, emissions from international shipping within EU waters are
widely expected to equal or surpass the total from all land-based
sources in all 27 EU member states combined- including power generation,
industry and transport.
In 2011 the UK’s Transport Select Committee concurred with this European Commission (EC) viewpoint, stating:
We no longer have ‘pea-soupers’ but these have been displaced by a
less visible problem. In 2000, 250,000 tonnes of PM known as ‘black
carbon’ or ‘soot’ was produced by internal shipping along the coastlines
of the EU alone. It is estimated that 70% of all sulphur emissions from
ships impact on land.
On 28th March 2012, Lloyd’s List reported that organised crime has found HFO a convenient place to dump chemical waste. Tests on bunker fuel in the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp found that nearly a third contained industrial waste products not naturally present in bunker fuel, including chlorine and zinc.
Just like fly-tipping on waste land, it would appear that like-attracts-like. Criminals have decided that an extremely dirty and toxic fuel burned out of sight is the perfect place to dump black market toxic waste.
In the next article I will examine the EU’s response, or lack of, to this issue.
Bunker fuel also generates disproportionate amounts of Particulate Matter (PM) in the form of various sulphur oxides and black carbon which is carcinogenic to the mammalian cardiovascular system.
The very long-chain hydrocarbons in bunker fuel do not burn as easily as the short ones found in domestic fuel, resulting in incomplete combustion. These tiny particles of soot and sulphuric acid are 500 times as fine as a human hair and so can be windborne many miles inland from the smokestack, where they can lodge in the lung and are near impossible for the human body to remove.
Modern container ships have 100,000+ horsepower engines weighing over 2,500 tons that operate 24hrs a day for an average of 280 days a year. An average 13,000-container vessel will combust about 250 tons of fuel a day. HFO has around 4,500 times the sulphur content of domestic diesel, so that one container ship typically generates about 5,000 tonnes of sulphur per year. This is particularly important for those living around coastal areas and ports as around 70% of ship emissions occur within 400km of land, arguably rendering the Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) land-ban redundant.
In 2005 Defra estimated the health impact of PM costs the UK between £8.5 billion and £20.2 billion per year. In late 2010 the Government advisory body Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants, published a report on the mortality effects of long-term exposure to PMs in the UK. It concluded that PMs contributed to the early deaths of up to 200,000 people in 2008 alone.
In 2008 a study by the US Scripps Institution of Oceanography revealed that black smoke from ships contributed as much as 44% of the sulphate found in fine particulate matter in the atmosphere of coastal California. An earlier study had found shipping emissions amounted to half of the smog-related sulphur dioxide in Los Angeles.
In 2010 the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) acted decisively upon research like this by designating a 230-mile wide shipping emission buffer zone of 0.1% sulphur off the entire North American coastline, declaring it an ‘Emission Control Area’ (ECA).
US ECA zone
However in Europe we presently have a scenario where international environmental targets mean land-based emissions from relatively clean-burning fuels are falling just as highly-polluting ship-based emissions are rising. The net result of this apparent lack of understanding is that, despite all the legislation for air quality and carbon-footprint reduction on land, coastal air quality within the EU has been dropping.
Land-based and shipping-based sulphur emissions
In 2011 the UK’s Transport Select Committee concurred with this European Commission (EC) viewpoint, stating:
“Emissions from shipping have been rising in absolute terms and as a percentage of all sulphur emissions. The Commission’s 2005 thematic strategy on air pollution calculated that sulphur emissions from shipping would rise by 45% between 2000 and 2020, by which time they would exceed emissions from all land-based sources combined.”The fallout of these emissions already affects many millions of people living around densely populated coastal regions. It was the uncontrolled emission of secondary Particulate Matter (PM) and sulphur that lead to the London smogs of the 1950s; they caused 4,075 deaths and resulted in the introduction of the Clean Air Act. Since then, the combustion of various types of diesel fuel within the transport sector has replaced the combustion of coal as the main source of particulates on both land and sea.
The view from Gyllyngvase Beach, Falmouth
On 28th March 2012, Lloyd’s List reported that organised crime has found HFO a convenient place to dump chemical waste. Tests on bunker fuel in the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp found that nearly a third contained industrial waste products not naturally present in bunker fuel, including chlorine and zinc.
Just like fly-tipping on waste land, it would appear that like-attracts-like. Criminals have decided that an extremely dirty and toxic fuel burned out of sight is the perfect place to dump black market toxic waste.
In the next article I will examine the EU’s response, or lack of, to this issue.
Post to be found at:
http://seaspout.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/sustainable-shipping/
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