Fuel Emissions (Transportation)

Latest story

138 Shares169 Views

Shipping Contributes Heavily to Climate Change. Are Green Ships the Solution?

by

On a bright September day on the harbor in Copenhagen, several hundred people gathered to welcome the official arrival of Laura Maersk.Laura was not a visiting European dignitary like many of those in attendance. She was a hulking containership, towering a hundred feet above the crowd, and the most visible evidence to date of an effort by the global shipping industry to mitigate its role in the planet’s warming.The ship, commissioned by the Danish shipping giant Maersk, was designed with a special engine that can burn two types of fuel — either the black, sticky oil that has powered ships for more than a century, or a greener type made from methanol. By switching to green methanol, this single ship will produce 100 fewer tons of greenhouse gas per day, an amount equivalent to the emissions of 8,000 cars.The effect of global shipping on the climate is hard to overstate. Cargo shipping is responsible for nearly 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — producing roughly as much carbon each year as the aviation industry does.Figuring out how to limit those emissions has been tricky. Some ships are turning to an age-old strategy: harnessing the wind to move them. But ships still need a more constant source of energy that is powerful enough to propel them halfway around the world in a single go.Unlike cars and trucks, ships can’t plug in frequently enough to be powered by batteries and the electrical grid: They need a clean fuel that is portable.Ursula von der Leyen, center, the president of the E.U. Commission, stands with the captains of the Laura Maersk as well as company and government officials in Copenhagen in September.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesThe Laura Maersk is the first of its kind to set sail with a green methanol engine and represents a significant step in the industry’s efforts to address its contribution to climate change. The vessel is also a vivid illustration of just how far the global shipping sector has to go. While roughly 125 methanol-burning ships are now on order at global shipyards from Maersk and other companies, that is just a tiny portion of the more than 50,000 cargo ships that ply the oceans today, which deliver 90 percent of the world’s traded goods.The market for green methanol is also in its infancy, and there is no guarantee that the new fuel will be made in sufficient quantities — or at the right price — to power the vast fleet of cargo ships operating worldwide.Shipping is surprisingly efficient: Transporting a good by container ship halfway around the world produces far less climate-warming gas than trucking it across the United States.That’s true in part because of the scale of modern cargo vessels. The biggest container ships today are larger than aircraft carriers. Each one is able to carry more than 20,000 metal containers, which would stretch for 75 miles if placed in a row.That incredible efficiency has lowered the cost of transport and enabled the modern consumer lifestyle, allowing retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Ikea and Home Depot to offer a vast suite of products at a fraction of their historical cost.Yet that easy consumption has come at the price of a warmer and dirtier planet. In addition to affecting the atmosphere, ships burning fossil fuel also spew out pollutants that reduce the life expectancy of the large percentage of the world’s people who live near ports, said Teresa Bui, policy director for climate at Pacific Environment, an environmental organization.Cargo ships at the Port of Los Angeles in 2021 sometimes had to wait days to dock because of congestion, producing huge amounts of pollution.Coley Brown for The New York TimesThat pollution was particularly bad during the Covid-19 pandemic, when supply chain bottlenecks caused ships to pile up outside of the Port of Los Angeles, producing pollution equivalent to nearly 100,000 big rigs per day, she said.“They have been under regulated for decades,” Ms. Bui said of the shipping industry.Some shipping companies have tried to cut emissions in recent years and comply with new global pollution standards by fueling their vessels with liquefied natural gas. Yet environmental groups, and some shipping executives, say that adopting another fossil fuel that contributes to climate change has been a move in the wrong direction.Maersk and other shipping companies now see greener fuels such as methanol, ammonia and hydrogen as the most promising path for the industry. Maersk is trying to cut its carbon emissions to zero by 2040, and is pouring billion of dollars into cleaner fuels, along with other investors. But making the switch — even to methanol, the most commercially viable of those fuels today — is no easy feat.Switching to methanol requires building new ships, or retrofitting old ones, with different engines and fuel storage systems. Global ports must install new infrastructure to fuel the vessels when they dock.Perhaps most crucially, an entire industry still needs to spring up to produce green methanol, which is in demand from airlines and factory owners as well as from shipping carriers.Methanol, which is used to make chemicals and plastics as well as fuel, is typically produced using coal, oil or natural gas. Green methanol can be made in far more environmentally friendly ways by using renewable energy and carbon captured from the atmosphere or siphoned from landfills, cow and pig manure, or other bio waste.By using green methanol, the Laura Maersk could produce 100 fewer tons of greenhouse gas per day, equivalent to the emissions of 8,000 cars.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesCargo ships require fuel sources that are powerful enough to propel them halfway around the world in a single go.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesFlemming Sogaard Christensen, the chief engineer of the Laura Maersk, inside the engineering room. The ship’s engine can burn oil or a greener type of fuel made from methanol.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesBut the world today does not yet produce much green methanol. Maersk has committed to using only sustainably produced methanol, but if other shipping companies end up using methanol fuel made with coal or oil, that will be no better for the environment.Ahmed El-Hoshy, the chief executive of OCI Global, which makes methane from natural gas and greener sources like landfill gas, said companies today were producing “infinitesimally small volumes” of green methanol using renewable energy.“Companies haven’t done much in our industry yet quite frankly,” he said. “It’s all hype.”Fuel producers still need to master the technology to build these projects, he said. And in order to finance them they need buyers who are willing to commit to long-term contracts for green fuel, which can be three to five times as expensive as conventional fuel.Maersk has signed contracts with fuel providers including OCI and European Energy, which is building in Denmark what will be the world’s largest plant producing methanol with renewable electricity. The shipping company already has clients like Amazon and Volvo that are willing to pay more to have their goods transported with green fuels, in order to reduce their own carbon footprints.But many other companies are not yet willing to pay the necessary cost for greener technologies, Mr. El-Hoshy said.The missing piece, said Mr. El-Hoshy and others in the shipping and methanol industries, is regulation that would help level the playing field between companies trying to clean up their emissions and those still burning dirtier fuels.The European Union is ushering in rules that encourage ships to decarbonize, including new subsidies for green fuels and penalties for fossil fuel use. The United States is also spurring new investments in green fuel production and more modern ports through generous domestic spending programs.Maersk has clients like Amazon and Volvo that are willing to pay more to have their goods transported with green fuels, in order to reduce their own carbon footprints.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesBut proponents say the key to a green transition in the shipping sector are global rules that are pending through the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations body that regulates global shipping.The organization has long received heavy criticism for its lagging efforts on climate. This summer, it adopted a more ambitious target: eliminating the global shipping industry’s greenhouse gas emissions “by or around” 2050.To get there, nations have promised to agree on a legally binding way to regulate emissions by the end of 2025, which they would put into effect in 2027.Yet countries have yet to agree on what kind of regulation to use. They are debating whether to adopt a new standard for cleaner fuels, new taxes per ton of greenhouse gas emitted or some kind of mix of tools.Some developing countries, and nations that export low-value goods like farm products, say that strict regulation would raise shipping costs and be economically harmful.Proponents of the regulation — including Maersk — say it’s necessary to avoid penalizing those who are trying to clean up the business, and provide certainty about the industry’s direction.“There has to be an economic mechanism by which you level the playing field so that people are incentivized and not punished for using low-carbon fuels,” said John Butler, the chief executive of the World Shipping Council, which represents container carriers including Maersk.“Then you can invest with some confidence,” he added.A container ship traveling halfway around the world produce less climate-warming gas than a truck traveling across the United States.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesVincent Clerc, the chief executive of Maersk, said the company would continue to adopt new green technologies as they became available.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesStill, Maersk acknowledges that green methanol is unlikely to be the final solution. Experts say that the fuel’s reliance on finite sources of waste, like corn husks and cow manure, mean there will not be enough to power the entire global shipping fleet.In an interview, Vincent Clerc, the chief executive of Maersk, said that the entire maritime sector was unlikely to ever be powered predominantly by methanol. But Maersk had no regrets about moving some of its fleet from fossil fuels to methanol now, then adopting new technologies as they become available, he said.“This marks a real systemic change for this sector,” Mr. Clerc said, gesturing toward the vessel piled high with 20-foot containers in front of him.Eric Leveridge, the climate campaign manager for Pacific Environment, said his group was glad that Maersk and other shipping companies were moving toward more sustainable fuels. But the organization is still concerned that “it is more for optics and that the impact is potentially being exaggerated,” he said.“When it comes down to it, even if there is this investment, there’s still a lot of heavy fuel oil ships on the water,” he said. More

More stories

  • 125 Shares179 Views

    in Economy

    Will War Make Europe’s Switch to Clean Energy Even Harder?

    by

    At the Siemens Gamesa factory in Aalborg, Denmark, where the next generation of offshore wind turbines is being built, workers are on their hands and knees inside a shallow, canoe-shaped pod that stretches the length of a football field. It is a mold used to produce one half of a single propeller blade. Guided by laser markings, the crew is lining the sides with panels of balsa wood.The gargantuan blades offer a glimpse of the energy future that Europe is racing toward with sudden urgency. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia — the European Union’s largest supplier of natural gas and oil — has spurred governments to accelerate plans to reduce their dependence on climate-changing fossil fuels. Armed conflict has prompted policymaking pledges that the more distant threat of an uninhabitable planet has not.Smoothly managing Europe’s energy switch was always going to be difficult. Now, as economies stagger back from the second year of the pandemic, Russia’s attack on Ukraine grinds on and energy prices soar, the painful trade-offs have crystallized like never before.Moving investments away from oil, gas and coal to sustainable sources like wind and solar, limiting and taxing carbon emissions, and building a new energy infrastructure to transmit electricity are crucial to weaning Europe off fossil fuels. But they are all likely to raise costs during the transition, an extremely difficult pill for the public and politicians to swallow.The crisis that has inspired Europe to more quickly reach toward clean energy sources like wind and solar also risks pitching it backward by unwinding efforts to shut coal mines and stop drilling new oil and gas wells to replace Russian fuel and bring prices down.Workers at Siemens Gamesa preparing a mold used to produce one half of a single propeller blade.Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York TimesIn Germany, Europe’s largest economy, leaders are planning to have several coal-fired power plants that were recently taken off the grid placed in reserve, so that they could be quickly fired up if needed. After years of dithering about investing so much in the natural gas infrastructure, Germany is also accelerating plans to build its own terminals for receiving liquefied natural gas, another fossil fuel.“Security of our energy supply stands above everything else at the moment,” said Robert Habeck, the country’s economy minister and a Green party leader in the coalition government.Local officials are taking similar steps. Last week, the Munich government decided to extend the life of one of the city’s coal-fired power plants, scrapping plans to convert it to burn natural gas in spring 2023.And that’s in a country that has helped spearhead Europe’s efforts to shift to renewable energy.In Poland, which gets 70 percent of its energy from coal and has been at loggerheads with the European Union over the climate agenda, the sudden energy shortage is being used by critics as evidence that the push to shut mines was a mistake.A power plant in Poland run by CEZ Group, a Czech conglomerate of companies in the energy sector.Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesDominik Kolorz, head of the Silesian region of Solidarity Trade Union, said through a translator that “the so-called E.U. climate policy” was leading to a “huge economic crisis” and “total energy dependence on the Russian Federation.”In many ways, Europe has been a leading laboratory for the decades-long transition. It started establishing taxes on carbon emissions more than 20 years ago. The European Union pioneered an emissions trading system, which capped the amount of greenhouse gases companies produced and created a marketplace where licenses for those emissions could be bought and sold. Polluting industries like steel were gradually pushed to clean up. Last year, members proposed a carbon tax on imports from carbon-producing sectors like steel and cement.And it has led the way in generating wind power, especially from ocean-based turbines. Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, for example, has been instrumental in planting rows of colossal whirligigs at sea that can generate enough green energy to light up cities.Europe, too, is on the verge of investing billions in hydrogen, potentially the multipurpose clean fuel of the future, which might be generated by wind turbines.At Siemens Gamesa in Brande, a prototype for an even larger wind turbine.Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York TimesWind turbines can potentially generate enough green energy to light up cities.Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York TimesSuch exhilarating innovation, though, sits next to despair-inducing obstacles.Even before the invasion of Ukraine, a tight natural gas market, exacerbated by Russia’s restraining of supplies, had pushed gas and electricity prices to record levels, leading to shutdowns of fertilizer plants and other factories because of high costs. Household energy bills are set to rise by about 50 percent in Britain and drivers across Europe faced shock at the pump.European countries, most notably Germany, had mapped out strategies that relied on increasing dependence on Russian gas and oil in the medium term. That is no longer an option.After the invasion, Olaf Scholz, the chancellor of Germany, halted approval of Nord Stream 2, an $11 billion gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea that directly links Russia to northeastern Germany.As Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, said when she announced a plan on March 8 to make Europe independent of Russian fossil fuels: “We simply cannot rely on a supplier who explicitly threatens us.” The proposal calls for member nations to reduce Russian natural gas imports by two-thirds by next winter and to end them altogether by 2027 — a very tall order.This week, European Union leaders are again meeting to discuss the next phase of proposals, but deep divisions remain over how to manage the current price increases amid anxieties that Europe could face a double whammy of inflation and recession.On Monday, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres warned that intense focus on quickly replacing Russian oil could mean that major economies “neglect or kneecap policies to cut fossil fuel use.”A hydrogen test station near the Siemens Gamesa design center. Hydrogen produced with wind power could be a multipurpose clean fuel of the future.Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York TimesThere are other technological, financial, regulatory and political hurdles. The ability to cheaply generate, transport and store a clean replacement fuel like hydrogen to power trucks, cars and airplanes remains years away.And there is the need to find a better business model.Siemens Gamesa is the world’s leading maker of offshore wind turbines, a key vehicle for achieving climate targets. The company is also working on a giant turbine that would be dedicated solely to producing green hydrogen.Yet, at the company’s offshore design center in Brande, a two-hour drive from Aalborg, the conversations focus on worries as much as bright prospects. The company just replaced its chief executive because of poor financial performance.Industry executives say that despite the huge climate ambitions of many countries, Siemens Gamesa and its competitors are struggling to make a profit and keep the orders coming in fast enough to finance their factories. It doesn’t help that building plants is often a condition for breaking into new markets like the United States, where Siemens Gamesa agreed to erect a facility in Virginia.Morten Pilgaard Rasmussen of Siemens Gamesa says companies like his struggle to get projects approved swiftly.Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York TimesMorten Pilgaard Rasmussen, chief technology officer of the offshore wind unit at Siemens Gamesa, said that companies like his “are now forced to do investments based on the prosperous future that we are all waiting for.”The Russia-Ukraine War and the Global EconomyCard 1 of 6Rising concerns. More