Curbing Greenhouse gas emission from ships

India has no intention of agreeing with anything that is made mandatory by the Indian Maritime Organisation (IMO) with regard to curtailing carbon dioxide emissions. This was revealed by India’s IMO representatives during an ‘Awareness Seminar on Greenhouse Gases (GHG) Emission from Ships’ held on September 06, 2008 at the Maritime Training Institute of the Shipping Corporation of India, Mumbai.
The net effect of shipping as a result of emission is actually that it has a cooling affect on the earth since shipping emits sulphur dioxides, methane and other flue gases which help to reflect the sunlight back instead of allowing it to reach the earth, informed I.N. Bose, general manager of Great Eastern. Thus shipping is said to cool the earth.
Greenhouse gases are those that absorb infra-red radiation present in the atmosphere. The gases responsible for this are water vapour, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, halogenated fluorocarbons, ozone, perfluorinated carbons, and hydrofluorocarbons. The emissions produced as greenhouse gases allow incoming solar radiation to pass through the Earth's atmosphere, but prevent most of the outgoing infra-red radiation from the surface and lower atmosphere from escaping into outer space.
“Melting of the Artic ice cap, frequent generation of cyclones of large magnitude, floods and droughts are the cause of excess GHG,” stated D. Mehrotra, Deputy chief surveyor-cum-Senior DDG (Technical). “In order to curtail harmful emissions for ships the IMO passed the Resolution A 963 (23) as a guideline for adoption by member countries. These guidelines indicate how marine bunker fuel emission could be restricted.

“India’s stand has been that we will not agree to anything that is made mandatory by IMO on marine bunker fuel emission because they want to impose a bunker levy. Our contention is that this levy should not be on the same basis that is fixed for developed countries. There should be a differentiation between the levy charged for the developed and under-developed countries. It is not right for the IMO to impose the same standards for both. If there is no differentiated responsibility it amounts to penalising the shipping trade.”

The emission from shipping is less than that caused by road transport but more than that from airliners. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh too recently came out with an action plan for the country to achieve emission reduction at the national level.

I.N. Bose, general manager, Great Eastern, explained that for bringing down ship emissions it is possible to do so at the design stage of a ship by adhering to certain standards. “Operating index should not be mandatory but recommendatory by nature although it could be made mandatory in future. Coming to ship design, if classification societies that are paid by the ship owners are made responsible to undertake the certification during the construction stage itself, there will be a tendency to compromise on the design of a ship. Hence, it is difficult to define a common base line for all ships.”

It was observed by the working group appointed by IMO that if a market-based mechanism for transport is to be introduced, it should not be more per ton that is moved by ship than by road because in that case there would be a tendency for cargo to get shifted on to road transport. Global levy on marine bunker fuel should be designed to act as an incentive for reducing fuel consumption. Besides, levy has to be very high to alter consumption behaviour and if the cost is passed on to the consumer only then would the purpose be served. It was also established that the collected funds must be managed by the shipping companies and this money should go to pay those who pollute less than those who pollute more. However, the working group could not come to any consensus on this issue.

The initial focus on the concept of indexing scheme and GHG was on carbon dioxide emission. This indexing developed by the IMO working group on air pollution is based on operational data and has the benefit of easy access to the necessary data according to U.K. Kalghatgi, chief surveyor of Indian Register of Shipping. This operational data describes the true environmental input / output from the use of a ship. The unit of measurement is the basis for CO2 emission. “At the IMO meeting it was only India which could come up with the input data with regard to the elements considered in development of GHG emission standards,” he said.

Khetan Deshmukh from Lloyd Register gave an overview of the climate change and the focus on clean development mechanism. He noted that since all issues of climate change have cropped up over just the past two hundred years after the industrial revolution, this clearly indicates that the previous generations prior to that lived in harmony with nature.

Venkata R. Kakaraparthi of DNV warned, “If the Earth warms up by 0.75 oC, then the effect is that the ice will begin melting in the Artic; endangered species will get extinct; many islands may disappear and we don’t know what will happen to crops.”

Earlier when targets were fixed for cutting down on emissions there was no mechanism to keep them in place. Now three mechanisms have been developed. It may be long before IMO members become serious about operating in a safe atmosphere.