Search for any green Service

Find green products from around the world in one place

Maersk launches the world’s first offshore electric vessel-charging station venture

Maersk launches the world’s first offshore electric vessel-charging station venture

Maersk Supply Service, a subsidiary of Danish shipping giant Maersk, is launching Stillstrom – an offshore vessel-charging venture to support the decarbonization of the maritime industry by eliminating idle emissions.

 

Maersk’s offshore charging venture

Stillstrom will deliver offshore electric charging solutions to vessels at ports, hubs, and offshore energy operations.

Offshore charging for idle vessels is critical to facilitating the decarbonization of the maritime industry, since it allows vessel owners to replace fossil fuels with electricity while moored to a charging buoy (image above).

Stillstrom and Danish wind giant Ørsted will demonstrate the world’s first full-scale offshore charging station for vessels at an offshore wind farm in third quarter 2022. Stillstrom’s power buoy will supply overnight power to one of Ørsted’s Service Operations Vessels (SOV). Ørsted will be responsible for the grid integration of the charging buoy.

 

 

Ørsted will publicly share the intellectual property generated during the design of the buoy’s integration into the offshore wind farm in order to encourage uptake of the charging buoy in the offshore wind sector.

The charging buoy will be large enough to charge an SOV-sized battery- or hybrid-electric vessel. It will be scaled and adapted to supply power to larger vessels, enabling vessels of all sizes to turn off their engines when lying idle.

By substituting fossil fuels with clean electricity, virtually all emissions and noise pollution are eliminated while the buoy is in use.

 

Sebastian Klasterer Toft, venture program manager at Maersk Supply Service, said:

The mission is to remove 5.5 million tons of CO2 within five years of commercial rollout, additionally eliminating particulate matter, [nitrogen oxides] and [sulfur oxides].

 

Dirty shipping

This announcement is welcome news, as climate pollution from the booming international shipping sector rose by nearly 5% last year, according to a new report from shipbroker Simpson Spence & Young.

Bloomberg reported that ocean-freight carriers pulled in estimated profits of $150 billion in 2021 — a nine-fold annual jump after a decade.

International shipping currently accounts for around 3% of global climate pollution. To put that in perspective, it’s more than all coal-fired power plants in the United States combined, and more than the emissions of Germany.

 

Dawny’all Heydari, campaign lead of the Ship It Zero Campaign at Pacific Environment, said:

Now is the perfect time for international ocean shipping companies to invest their record profits into a horizon of hope for our shared future on this planet.

Carriers CMA-CGM, MSc, Cosco, Evergreen, and Yang Ming must commit to a 100% zero-emissions supply chain this decade, following initial leadership by Maersk. Their top big retail customers, Walmart and Target, must urge this speedy transition.

Black and brown frontline communities are bearing the brunt of fossil-fuel spewing ocean cargo ships and the problem is only getting more severe with each passing day. It’s about time that the shipping sector takes its responsibility seriously and stops hurting our port cities and oceans in the name of profits.

 


 

Source Electrek

Shipping industry willing to pay for premium on ‘green fuels’—Maersk chief

Shipping industry willing to pay for premium on ‘green fuels’—Maersk chief

The maritime sector is prepared to pay extra for using clean fuel to transport its cargo over one that emits more greenhouse gases, said Søren Skou, chief executive of Danish shipping giant AP Moller-Maersk. 

Speaking at a virtual session at the Ecosperity sustainability conference on Tuesday, Skou said that more than half of its 200 largest customers have met – or are in the process of setting – signed science-based or zero-carbon targets that will force them to cut emissions that directly and indirectly impact  their value chains. Its major customers include German car manufacturer BMW Group and clothing multinationals H&M Group, Levi Strauss & Co. and Marks & Spencer, among others. 

“We are today selling a biofuels-based carbon neutral transportation product which is growing quite nicely from a very small base. But nevertheless, there are customers out there in container shipping that are willing to pay a [green] premium [for low-carbon fuel],” Skou told panellists in the event hosted by Singapore investment firm Temasek. 

Maersk signed a contract in August to secure green methanol—produced by using renewable sources such as biomass and solar energy—as the world’s largest shipping firm gears up to operate its first carbon-neutral ship in 2023. With about 90 per cent of world trade transported by sea, global shipping accounts for nearly three per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. Maersk needs to have a carbon neutral fleet by 2030 to meet its target of net-zero emissions by 2050. 

While those who can afford to pay the green premium are big global brands which comprise only 10 to up to 20 per cent of the business, Skou noted that customers in other transport sectors like aviation are likewise able to pay for it.  

“I think the world can actually pay for decarbonisation. We can afford this if we want to, [like adding] US$50 to the cost of an international airlines flight. For me the issue is more [about] scaling,” he said. 

The scale-up of the production of new fuels will require getting global and regional regulations in place, raising efficiency standards, and getting governments to cut bureaucratic red-tape and slash the time for the approval of permits for low carbon technologies, he shared. 

Juliet Teo, head of transportation and logistics at Temasek, said that the only mechanism that would work would be to shift the cost of the premium to all the customers along the value chain. This could mean more expensive products for consumers.  

“Unfortunately, the transportation industry has the poorest record of getting its customers to help with paying any additional fuel cost. Whether it’s extra fuel surcharge that you have to pay when you fly, or charging additional bunker costs to customers for shipping, it’s very hard. It hasn’t been very successful,” she told the panel. 

 

Peter Vanacker, president and chief executive of Neste Corporation, a Finland-based refining company concentrating on low-emission fuels, called for regulations to be in place to adopt pricier sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), but emphasised the urgency. 

SAF, made using biofuel, hydrogen or carbon, is currently more costly than traditional fossil jet fuel due to a lower availability of sustainable feedstocks – compared to widely available fossil oil – and the continuing development of new technologies. It has been used in a blend with conventional fuel since 2011, with the hope it will make up the majority as the technology matures.  

“The clock is ticking and the climate crisis is here,” he said. “Do not wait until governments all over the world have agreed upon one measure of how to decarbonise the aviation industry.” 

Neste has been in discussions with Temasek, the Singapore government, the national airline and Changi airport about using sustainable aviation fuels for flights departing the nation state. Its plant in Singapore will be the firm’s largest once completed in 2023.  

 

Gates: the green premium may exclude poorer countries

Bill Gates, American tech magnate and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, echoed how there was “no chance” for consumers, especially those from middle income countries to pay for pricier products that emit less carbon over cheaper alternatives.  

“Unless that green premium is very low or is being subsidised, middle income countries will say that the rich countries did most of the emissions, so they’ll have to go solve this thing. And with [the price of] today’s premiums, there’s no chance [they would pay for it],” Gates said in a separate virtual session. 

The philanthropist describes the green premium as the difference in cost between a product that involves emitting carbon and an alternative that does not. 

“I think the climate movement got very focused on near-term reductions…what can be done by 2020, and then 2030. The hard areas like how we make steel, cement, beef; how jets make long trips or cross-ocean shipping takes place – I think we are grossly under-invested in the research and new approaches in the hard [to abate] areas,” Gates said on Tuesday.  

Over US$5 trillion a year in global subsidies was needed to pay for green premiums to support innovations such as carbon capture technologies and green hydrogen, according to Gates. Investment and government involvement to help increase the scale of projects beyond pilot stage could help to drive the cost down by over 90 per cent.  

The cost of new technologies, innovations to curb the climate crisis will have to be reduced dramatically for middle-income countries to adopt them at scale. “The skills of the private sector, the policy and involvement of the government is very critical,” Gates said.  

 


 

Source: Eco Business

Shipping firm Maersk spends £1bn on ‘carbon neutral’ container ships

Shipping firm Maersk spends £1bn on ‘carbon neutral’ container ships

The world’s biggest shipping company is investing $1.4bn (£1bn) to speed up its switch to carbon neutral operations, ordering eight container vessels that can be fuelled by traditional bunker fuel and methanol.

The Danish shipping business Maersk said the investment in new vessels would help to ship goods from companies including H&M Group and Unilever, while saving more than 1m tonnes of carbon emissions a year by replacing older fossil fuel-driven ships.

The vessel order, placed with South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries, is the single largest step taken so far to decarbonise the global shipping industry, which is responsible for almost 3% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The shipping industry has been relatively slow to react to calls to reduce fossil fuel use, in part because cleaner alternatives have been in short supply and are more expensive.

Søren Skou, the Maersk chief executive, said: “The time to act is now, if we are to solve shipping’s climate challenge.

“This order proves that carbon neutral solutions are available today across container vessel segments and that Maersk stands committed to the growing number of our customers who look to decarbonise their supply chains.

“Further, this is a firm signal to fuel producers that sizeable market demand for the green fuels of the future is emerging at speed.”

The eight vessels, which will each have capacity for 16,000 containers, are expected to be delivered by early 2024. They will be 10-15% more expensive than bunker fuel container ships, each costing $175m.

The Danish company aims to only order new vessels that can use carbon neutral fuel as it seeks to deliver net zero emissions by 2050.

Maersk said more than half of its 200 largest customers – including Amazon, Disney and Microsoft – had set or were in the process of setting targets to cut emissions in their supply chains.

Maersk plans to run the vessels on methanol, rather than fossil fuels, as soon as possible but admitted this would be challenging because it would require a significant increase in the production of “proper carbon neutral methanol”.

The company set out plans last week to produce green fuel for its first vessel to operate on carbon neutral methanol alongside REintegrate, a subsidiary of the Danish renewable energy company European Energy.

The Danish facility is expected to produce about 10,000 tonnes of carbon neutral e-methanol, using green hydrogen combined with carbon emissions captured from burning bioenergy such as biomass.

Henriette Hallberg Thygesen, the chief executive of Maersk’s fleet and strategic brands, said the green methanol partnership could “become a blueprint for how to scale green fuel production” and “decarbonise our customers’ supply chains”.

The new additions to Maersk’s fleet are “the ideal large vessel type to enable sustainable, global trade on the high seas in the coming decades”, she said, and “will offer our customers unique access to carbon neutral transport on the high seas while balancing their needs for competitive slot costs and flexible operations”.

Leyla Ertur, the head of sustainability at H&M Group, said Maersk’s investment in large vessels operating on green methanol was “an important innovative step supporting the retailer’s climate goals” to become climate neutral by 2030 and climate positive by 2040.

 


 

Source The Guardian

 

Maersk eyes ‘leapfrog’ to carbon neutral fuels in shipping

Maersk eyes ‘leapfrog’ to carbon neutral fuels in shipping

The Danish shipping giant is looking at ways of cutting emissions this decade, saying the industry needs to act with a “crisis mindset” in order to respond to the climate emergency.

For Maersk, this means ditching transition fuels such as liquified natural gas (LNG), which are cleaner than the heavy oil traditionally used in large vessels but are still harmful to the environment because they are made from fossil gas.

“From our perspective as a company, we believe we have to leapfrog to carbon neutral fuels for our vessels and for transportation in general,” said Morten Bo Christiansen, head of decarbonisation at Maersk.

“Any talk about so-called transition fossil fuels is simply not relevant from our perspective, it’s simply not solving the problem,” he told an online press briefing last month. “The last thing we need is another cycle of fossil fuel assets,” he added, pointing out that ships built today have an average lifetime of about 20 to 30 years and will therefore still be around in 2050.

International shipping accounts for 2.2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), more than aviation’s 2% share. The IMO, a United Nations agency, has said it aims to halve greenhouse gas emissions from 2008 levels by 2050.

 

Methanol: ‘The here and now’

Because of the urgency to cut emissions already this decade, Christiansen said the first solution Maersk can turn to is methanol, which he described as a mature technology. “And we see later also ammonia,” he added.

The problem is that methanol today is mostly made from coal or natural gas, which are both polluting, Christiansen continued. This is why Maersk is looking at green methanol made from biomass gasification, or so-called “Power-to-X” where biogenic CO2 is added to hydrogen. “And same with ammonia, made from hydrogen and then just adding nitrogen.”

The hope is that these alternative shipping fuels will gradually become greener as biomass, ammonia and hydrogen are produced in growing quantities using sustainable production methods.

“But again, the ‘here and now’ perspective is that there is actually only one solution and that’s methanol,” Christiansen said, adding there are safety aspects to ammonia that need to be solved before it can be used on a commercial scale.

Maersk is seen as a trailblazer in the shipping industry when it comes to decarbonisation. On 2 June, the Danish firm called for a carbon tax on ship fuel to encourage the transition to cleaner alternatives. The Danish firm proposed a tax of at least $450 per tonne of fuel, which works out to $150 per tonne of carbon.

Maersk CEO Soren Skou called the tax proposal “a levy to bridge the gap between the fossil fuels consumed by vessels today and greener alternatives that are currently more expensive.”

 

Bottleneck

The main obstacle to green shipping fuels is scale. Production is still tiny and a massive increase in volume would be needed to decarbonise the shipping industry.

That requires quickly ramping up production of renewable electricity to produce green hydrogen “because that will very soon become the bottleneck here,” said Ulrik Stridbæk, head of regulatory affairs at Ørsted, the Danish energy firm.

“So we’re trying to match this with the electrons that will hopefully start to flow from the Baltic Sea,” said Stridbæk, who cited Danish government plans to build an “energy island” off Bornholm in the Baltic Sea to harness production of offshore wind to serve the Danish and German markets.

“This is the vision,” Stridbæk said. “Producing very large scale renewable electricity, and converting it” into green hydrogen and eFuels that can be used in the maritime and aviation sector.

Last year, Danish companies – including Ørsted, Scandinavian Airlines, and Maersk – launched the Green Fuels for Denmark initiative, with the aim of ramping up the production of renewable hydrogen in the country.

The first phase, targeted for 2023, would see the construction of a 10MW electrolyser to produce renewable hydrogen to be used as fuel for buses and trucks. By 2030, the capacity would reach 1.3GW, enough to supply the creation of more than 250,000 tonnes of sustainable fuel.

 

Access to renewable electricity

“Clearly the constraining factor here will be the production of these fuels and the access to the renewable energy that is needed,” said Maersk’s Christiansen.

However, the cost of producing green fuels – whether methanol, ammonia, or hydrogen – is prohibitively expensive at the moment. And while demand is expected to boom in the coming years, eFuels are expected to remain more expensive than oil until the end of this decade, Christiansen said.

“A market based system, some kind of carbon price would surely level the playing field and incentivise investments into this. That is clearly something that would help and would be needed in the long term,” he said.

At EU level, the European Commission is preparing proposals to mandate a gradual incorporation of green jet fuel in aviation, with percentages increasing over the years. A certification scheme for renewable and low-carbon fuels is also under consideration as part of the revision of the EU’s renewable energy directive.

The  proposal “will come with an updated set of incentives to promote the use of these fuels in various sectors,” the EU’s Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson announced in February.

The EU executive is also preparing a green fuel law for shipping – FuelEU Maritime – which is due to be published on 14 July.

A draft of that law, seen by The Guardian, has opted for a goal-based approach that would set increasingly stringent “greenhouse gas intensity targets” to be met for the energy used on board.

The result is that LNG would be eligible to power EU ships until around 2040, a prospect environmental groups described as “a disaster.”

 


 

Source EURACTIV