Real-world commercial marine decarbonisation

Commercial Marine Network delegates met live for the first time at the COP26 International Maritime Hub, hosted at the City of Glasgow College’s Maritime Campus on the banks of the Clyde, in partnership with Maritime UK and sponsored by M&H Engineering.

Ian Baylis, founder of CTV operator Seacat Services started proceedings as we meant to go on, with a pragmatic view on the importance of setting up a Carbon Management Plan.

With 14 vessels burning ‘several million litres of diesel per year’ Seacat Services started the decarbonisation ball rolling by employing external auditors to look at every aspect of what the company does, from sending a spare part to a boat by post, to choice of company vehicles.

The 47-page report that the auditors outputted put a “number to everything we do”. From this, the biggest carbon producing activities (those 14 vessels) could be identified, and a pathway created to improve those but also easy wins picked off. Based on the cycling-friendly Isle of Wight, one easy improvement to achieve, while also improving the wellbeing of staff was to issue some of them with eBikes to commute to work, with charging facilities available during the day so they could get home again.

2P OR NOT 2P

A larger early piece of progress was to strongly influence clients to burn HVO (Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil) instead of fossil diesel in the CTVs on charter. Ian mentioned that this has traditionally been a hard sell as HVO was more expensive, but prices have come down to the point where it is only 2p per litre more expensive than fossil diesel. “What price to be green?” is now his call to his charterers, and at 2p, it’s a much easier sell.

Bert De Ruiter Acta Marine’s Commercial Manager, Workboats, who joined the discussion remotely from The Netherlands opined that the price of not paying heed to sustainability would soon be existential for businesses like his. Acta’s view is that while moving the business onto a more sustainable footing would initially be expensive, it is an absolute necessity in order to stay in business.

Bert echoed Ian’s view that monitoring and reporting, both on day-to-day vessel usage and the business activities as a whole, was critical in this fight. Acta’s target is a carbon emission reduction of 70% by 2050, but Bert was quick to point out that, from what he’d heard from COP26 so far, that might need revising, potentially up to 100%.

FOILING AFFORDABLY

Dr Iain Percy, CEO of Artemis Technologies was our final speaker, with some interesting progress reports on his ambitious foiling commercial marine boats. The former Olympic sailing champion and America’s Cup sailor launched his company in 2017 with the help of 65M in financing, and is soon to launch an on-water demonstrator of an 11M fast workboat.

The company uses the modelling and simulation systems of Formula 1 and the America’s Cup along with all the other weapons of those disciplines such as high end composites engineering to improve the efficiency of workboats.

Iain was quick to point out that his company was about more than vessel efficiency though. Some of his ex Americas’ Cup engineers had to have an early change of mindset from ‘win at all costs’ to ‘increase efficiency at a cost’.

After all, if companies using your technology cannot do so and still turn a profit, your technology will never be widely implemented, however impressive, or cutting edge it first appears.

Artemis Technologies’ 11M eFoiler, is a likely visitor to Seawork in June 2022.

Don’t miss the Commercial Marine Network’s next webinar, where we’ll be turning our experts’ attention to Transfer & Access: Managing crew transfer safety in offshore energy and port operations