The failure to achieve political consensus at COP15 does away with idealism; hail pragmatism!
By Ryan Skinner (email)
In the last week, both LNG and biofuels have gained ground as plausible drivers for reducing emissions broadly across the shipping industry. Don't count on either of them making much headway, though. In fact, don't count on anything to win out.
More accurately, everything will win out. Shipping will grow greener not by one silver bullet solution to everything, but a very wide range of abatement technologies, new fuels, scrubbing, changes to operations, additives - all in a dog's breakfast.
What works for one trade won't work for another. COSCO's Capt. Wei suggested nuclear. Forget it. That's just a stunt; Wei's JFK moment, if you will. Sure, nuclear might work for a ship with very high energy needs and seldom access to refueling, such as the submarine tankers suggested for Arctic oil and gas development. Even that sounds crazy. Elsewhere it'll never work. Too expensive, clumsy, risky.
The fuel cell technology I've described earlier in this blog is another white elephant. It's great stuff, but prohibitively expensive. News from America about a fuel cell technology called Bloom Energy has created waves, but it has a strong hype feel. Expect nothing soon, and nothing revolutionary.
And solar? Basically if you cover the whole ship with panels, you get enough power to run...the radar. Solar's literally dead in the water.
Today the people driving down emissions are most likely the shippers themselves, when and if they have the interest and power. Charterers are hiring small consultancies that apply advanced mathematical models to the ships they employ and nip and tuck fuel consumption and emissions.
The regime problem adds to this mess. Practically every country, sometimes acting pan-regionally (the Baltic, for example), sometimes broken down to state level (hello, California!) has its own rules. The IMO's approach is perhaps the only universal approach that could ever work. Why? It's blindingly confusing, very weak and capable at any time to collapse.
What might have prevented this? A strong coalition of nations putting down a brutally strict emissions regime, then putting massive investment behind technology development. That didn't happen. It's a pity, as governmental support is necessary to speed up testing and comparison of new technologies. That, coupled with a rigourous approach to proving claims and throwing out junk technology by classification societies, might have propelled the industry forward.
As it is, shipping will see no great leaps forward. It's all a slow and painful process of trial and error, mixing and matching solutions, measurement, regulatory setbacks and occasionally audacious PR. Today, however, I meet a director of the Norwegian Shipowners' Association who was at COP15 to discuss precisely this theme. Come back later to this blog for his nuance...
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