Tomorrow’s burning issue?

A personal look at what future holds for marine fuel

Is the shipping industry on the verge of a significant game-changer as it strives to meet tough IMO targets for reduced carbon emissions? In a speculative and not altogether serious vein, Gary Gimson looks ahead to some possible future scenarios – including battery power and sail assistance.

I’ve been in shipping a long time – since 1969, in fact. I’ve seen a few changes. Some of these have been revolutionary and others merely evolutionary, creeping up on us much more stealthily, but proving equally as challenging to the existing order.

So, having witnessed these changes over the past half century, I thought I might throw my mind forward to see what the long-term future could hold – and especially in one key area.

Making forecasts is far from easy. As anyone who watched science fiction films in the 1960s will know, the future never turns out quite as expected. What we now know and didn’t then is that progress actually resulted in cellphones, the internet and suchlike rather than humankind bothering to colonize the Moon or do battle with Martians as I had half expected, when growing up, would have happened by 2020.

In shipping, the really big game changers – like the switch from sail to steam or the move from coal to oil – come about only every few decades. If I could look ahead and make some unscientific forecasts, I would put money on a change of fuel type becoming significant as we progress through the 21st century.

Auto industry

This trend is already in evidence in the auto industry, where gasoline and diesel are making way for electric and maybe even super-clean hydrogen power. And it would appear that shipping is being shepherded in this general direction – although the economics of the two industries are not quite the same.

It’s easy to get things wrong, however. Here’s a major 2005 maritime fuel-use study which had this as its premise: “For the future technology scenarios, we assume a diesel-only fleet in 2020…It is expected that diesel engines will not be replaced in a foreseeable period of time.” To be fair, the report also recognised that vessel emissions would become an issue at some point. It certainly got that bit right.

So here we are on the cusp of the introduction in 2020 of the International Maritime Organization’s ambitious 0.5 per cent sulfur cap regulation, a move that is set to push up vessel operating costs this year by around three per cent in anticipation of the measure. It may not sound much, but we’re actually talking about a compliance bill of around US$ 2 billion for a carrier such as Maersk alone. Around one in five shipowners are expected to fit costly scrubbers in order to continue burning heavy fuel oil. By next year, fuel costs for the entire industry are expected to reach US$ 60 billion a year for operators who opt to forgo scrubbers and switch from HFO to marine gasoil.

And that’s not the end of it. By 2050 the IMO aims to halve the level of carbon emissions by the shipping industry compared with 2008 levels. These ongoing and burdensome increases in operating costs are bound to make shipowners and, in turn, engine builders place further emphasis on fuel consumption and, possibly, on the actual means of propulsion. It could be the catalyst for a range of alternatives in terms of traditional bunker fuels or, fanciful as it may sound, even a partial return to sail.

Wind-assisted

In fact, Issue 35 of Caribbean Maritime illustrated the fresh thinking that is being channelled into wind-assisted power and the innovative steps being taken to reduce fuel burn. However, the intermittent nature of wind means it can only ever make a marginal contribution – in much the same way as it does for power generation on land.

As we can already see, liquefied natural gas is set to be the choice of many as an interim and workable away around the sulfur cap. The decision in 2018 by CMA CGM to order nine LNG-powered mega containerships is perhaps the clearest example yet of where we are going in the container sector; and this follows similar developments in the protected Jones Act trades and in the cruise and ferry sectors.

But even if all the world’s vessels switched to LNG power, shipping would still not meet the IMO’s tough and possibly unrealistic 2050 decarbonisation targets. After all, ‘clean-burning’ LNG still produces carbon dioxide.

So, looking further ahead, there has to be a ‘fuel’ beyond LNG. Maybe it’s hydrogen; maybe it’s a super-scaled-up version of the type of batteries now powering cars. Unfortunately, I have no real idea what that ‘fuel’ might be – and neither, for the time being it seems, does anyone else.