Making the Ships Cleaner & More Efficient
This is part two of our look at the energy issues that the world’s largest container shipping company, MaerskLine, deals with, through the insight of Lee Kindberg, Environmental Director for Maersk’s North American Operations. You can check out part I at
http://www.thegreenergrass.org/2008/01/interview-intermodal-shipping-maersk.htmlLeading in Energy EfficiencyNow that I know a little more about the system, can you tell me more about where it’s evolving in the future?“We’re seeing some bigger ships, but we’re also seeing ships designed from the keel up to be more energy efficient and environmentally responsible. This does mean lower air emissions. For example, we’re now building waste heat recovery systems into our ships. These systems provide up to 10% efficiency improvement in engine fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions.
There are many other issues that we look at, in addition to energy efficiency, in terms of environmental design. For example, another environmental issue for ships is the hull coatings that prevent growth and build-up on the vessel hull. Those growths create drag which reduces energy efficiency and hurts ship performance. Unfortunately the old ones were toxic to other marine organisms. We’ve replaced the old type with a less toxic version, and are now transitioning to new silicone-based hull coatings that are non-toxic.”
Maersk appears to be a leader in advanced energy-efficiency technology in shipping. Can you tell me if Maersk a significant driver in making these advances happen through research and development?“We have a group in Copenhagen called the Technical Organisation who are ship architects and engineers. We also work very closely with the ship yards, engine manufacturers and other suppliers around the world. As you can imagine, we’re fairly big customers of theirs. For the waste heat recovery system, we actually worked with four different suppliers and their research arms to optimize four different components of the equipment and the control system. In order to optimize the energy output from the total system, they actually had to make part of it less efficient to maximize the overall waste heat recovery. Bringing those four suppliers together to optimize energy efficiency was a pretty big step forward, and that system is now being built into a lot of our ships.”
This seems like a great investment in that not only are you making more profit – its good business sense, but it’s also better for the environment. Can you do that all the time?“We can’t do that every time, because sometimes they’re not cost effective. But in many cases when we make investments that improve energy efficiency, we also improve the bottom line, so those are sustainable projects because they pay for themselves. They make business sense and they make good environmental sense.
You know EPA’s definition of sustainability includes both economics and environmental impact.”Clearing the West Coast Air
What about projects that might not pay for themselves?“Not every project proposed makes good business sense; they still have to pass financial hurdle rates. But in some cases we actually do things that we know cost us more money. Today is actually an interesting day to be doing this interview, because at 6 o’clock, the Carsten Maersk will pull into Tacoma. When she gets to dock, she’ll switch to clean fuel in the auxiliary engines used for the entire time she’s tied up. At all four major ports where we have regularly scheduled vessel calls on the west coast, we will be burning clean fuel while we’re at dock. At the California ports we’ve also been doing it in the main engines and the auxiliaries while steaming in. It’s quite an expensive program. It absolutely does not pay for itself, but we believe it’s the right thing to do. We’re doing it to get experience burning these cleaner fuels, so we better understand what that does for all of the emissions factors, and also for operational concerns and maintenance.”
CO2 emissions are all over the news right now, but if you live in a port city, you’re much more concerned about what’s called criteria pollutants. These are the oxides of sulfur (SO2) that create acid rain and might have health effects, oxides of nitrogen (NOX) that are part of developing photochemical smog, and particulate matter, soot and fine particles that are not good to breathe. Those things are created by diesel engines whether they’re in ships, trains, or trucks, and whether they’re ours or your personal vehicle. But our volumes are bigger, so they’re a long term interest and concern to us.
The fact that we’re all so focused now on CO2 doesn’t take away from dealing with these criteria pollutants. We cannot lose focus on these because of air quality in port cities. We have to keep this in perspective;
we can’t do CO2 instead of criteria pollutants. And it’s a very important issue when you deal with power plants. The criteria pollutants have been a concern and we’ve been trying to reduce them for 30 years. There are still regions of the country that don’t meet the national air quality standards; some of it’s from natural sources and some of it’s from the activities of man.”
What’s the difference between clean fuel and regular fuel?“The typical bunker fuel they use when they’re out on the ocean has a maximum of 4- 4 ½ % sulfur, with an average of 2 ½ % sulfur. For people on landside, it’s similar to a No. 6 residual fuel oil used long ago to run boilers. It’s basically the leftovers from the refining business. It’s very cost effective, and these are huge diesel engines. The main engines on our biggest ships run 80,000 to 100,000 horsepower. Our S-class ships use the 80,000 hp engines, and are 1,200 feet long, as long as the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower. These are very large ships, and by the way, we run them with about 20 people.
The fuels that we switched to in our four West Cost ports are 0.2% maximum sulfur, and it’s been averaging just under 0.1%, so that’s a
95% reduction in emissions of sulfur oxides. It also reduces particulate matter or soot, by about 87%. That makes it a much cleaner fuel, but it’s also approximately double the price.”
With the double price, I suppose it’s not likely that all operations would switch to clean fuel:
”There have been different proposals for how to reduce air emissions in port cities, many of which do have air quality concerns. Fuel suppliers tell us there are capacity issues about how much low sulfur fuel is available in the world. Capacity constraints also raise cost issues. There are two different proposals for improving air quality internationally; one is to require all vessels to use a somewhat lower sulfur fuel. For example, some of the sulfur control areas such as the Black Sea, have a maximum of 1 ½ % sulfur.
The World Shipping Council, Maersk Line, and a number of others including the US EPA, support a different approach – focus our resources on using really clean fuel in the air sheds where people live and breathe, to provide a much greater improvement in those areas. The fuel switches we make really do that. You’ve probably heard that Oakland and Los Angeles have significant air quality considerations. We switch to clean fuel 24 nautical miles out in both the main and auxiliary engines. I’d like to note that we’re the only company switching in the mains.
While the ships are at dock, the main engines are shut down, but you do continue to run the auxiliary engines. At dock, in addition to running the controls and radios, you’ve got a much larger ongoing energy load for refrigerated containers. A fair number of the containers on board any one of those ships might contain, say, grapes from Chile. Those have to be kept at a very constant temperature, so they’re shipped in refrigerated containers which we call reefers.”
Refrigeration turns out to be a big factor in intermodal shipping, and we’ll touch on some unique energy improvements that MaerskLine has helped implement in the last and final installment.
Labels: Energy, Interviews, Transportation
1) Jodie’s mom recently read that it takes energy equal to 0.42 gallons of gasoline to produce and ship a single pound of beef, and energy equal to 0.01 gallons of gasoline to produce a single pound of vegetables. If her family consumes 25 pounds of beef and 35 pounds of vegetables every month:
2) Mike just bought a new handheld game system with his saved allowance. He is trying to decide whether to buy rechargeable batteries or disposable alkaline batteries. Over the course of the year he will need either 48 disposable batteries which cost 85 cents per battery or 8 rechargeable lithium batteries which cost 2 dollars each.
3) Joanne lives in Cincinnati and wants to visit her sister in Chicago for the weekend. She knows that using as little gasoline as possible helps the environment and she can either choose to take a Megabus or her own car. The trip is 320 miles. Her car gets 30 miles per gallon and she’ll be the only person in it. The bus gets 10 miles per gallon on the highway, and 35 people typically ride on this bus at the same time.
