IS MEPC 79 A WARM-UP ACT?

It’s not easy being the warm-up act in the shadow of the main event. Being on stage, facing an audience who has come to see another performer, rattling through a set list as the crowd mingles, buys drinks,and talks loudly, generally indifferent to your actions, is a tough proposition, says Esa Henttinen, executive vice president, NAPA Safety Solutions.

December’s meeting of the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) 79 had very much this feel to it. In July this year, MEPC 80 will take on the challenges of revising IMO’s green targets and introducing market-based measures to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It’s being billed as a “climactic meeting“ and a “summer showdown” – very much the headline act for fans of maritime environmental regulation.

If MEPC80 is playing the hits, December’s MEPC79 tackled more niche material – the “b-sides” of the environmental repertoire. But this doesn’t mean that the industry should ignore the outcomes. From new Emission Control Areas (ECAs), to ballast regulations and garbage management, important decisions here have moved forward processes and changed the regulatory landscape. Owners, crew and ship managers will need to react accordingly.

A consistent course on carbon

The topic of GHG emissions, even if it isn’t the main event, is ever present at an MEPC. As the Maritime Transition Scenarios report to which we contributed last year, outlines, the industry has a long way to go if it is to reach targets that are already set out, let alone become compliant with the Paris Agreement.

The outcomes on this front were sparse last year, with commentators describing the conference as one that “achieved little in terms of showing greater green targets”.

This puts more pressure on decisions to be made in July 2023 at MEPC 80. At the same time, MEPC 79 didn’t change anything when it comes to Carbon Intensity Indicator’s

(CII) implementation this year – it entered into force this January as expected, and is already the source of intense discussions as owners and charterers seek ways to manage the newly-enforced shared responsibility for vessel performance and CII ratings.

The eventual form of future contracts and clauses to manage CII will likely continue to evolve over the years to come. However, what’s certain is that decarbonisation pathways like CII will need collaboration to succeed.

The challenges of decarbonisation are so broad-ranging that no individual company can solve them alone. These include developing new technologies and fuels, the new designs that will incorporate them, the supply chains and infrastructure to deliver these fuels, and new business models to remove harmful incentives that still stand in the way of more efficient operations.

To achieve this, we need to collaborate more and create partnerships not only within shipping, but also across industries and the energy sector. The industry knows that and is willing to act, but to join partnerships with confidence shipping also needs more clarity on the business implications of joint pilot projects.

Owners, operators and charterers need to know that the “rules of the game” are fair and have the certainty that collaborating will yield positive outcomes for everyone involved.

To gain this greater certainty, the industry can rely on the latest generation of digital tools, which can model, simulate, and predict the impact of different measures. This is essential to understand the implications of new technologies on a ship’s safety, stability, operations and performance –but it doesn’t stop there.

These simulation tools can also help develop and test the new business models and contractual frameworks that are essential to set the right “foundations” for decarbonised shipping. With the latest generation of digital twins, we can now simulate the next day of the route, the next year of operations and the next 10 years of design. As such, these digital platforms are central to build confidence, speed up the transition, and ultimately find the best collaborative pathways to achieve net zero in shipping.

New ECAs to manage

Finding ways to cut GHG emissions are at the top of everyone’s agendas, but this isn’t the only way to make longterm progress towards sustainability in the industry. One of the most significant outcomes from the meeting was the designation of the Mediterranean Sea as a new Emission Control Area (ECA), which will restrict sulphur oxide (SOx) emissions from ships in the area. This is the fifth designated Emission Control Area for Sulphur Oxides and Particulate Matter worldwide, the others being the Baltic Sea area; the North Sea area; the North American area (covering designated coastal areas off the United States and Canada); and the United States Caribbean Sea area (around Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands).

The expansion of ECAs add a level of complexity to voyage planning, with operators often choosing to avoid them, in order to minimise spending on more expensive fuels.

This is another area where digital tools will be necessary to help crew and operators make sure they are making the optimal decisions. Data from voyages can help us see what happens when vessels pass through ECAs, and we’ve even crunched the numbers on whether it’s really worth avoiding them.

When we examined a set of 47 tanker voyages, we could see ships’ operational patterns on ECAs. We looked at routes with ECAs on both ends of a voyage, and found examples where there are clear repeating exit and entrance points to and from ECAs – implying that they are mainly avoided, with vessels sailing longer distances to compensate.

When retro-optimising these voyages, we found that when vessels avoid ECAs, they deviate a lot from the most optimal voyages as recommended by weather routing. When comparing the sailed voyages and the weather-routed alternatives, the price difference between fuel types is not generally enough to necessitate minimising the distance sailed inside an ECA above other considerations.

Instead, the weather-routed alternatives would have sailed much longer distances inside the ECAs and still would have saved an average of 15.9% in fuel cost. Additionally, the optimised routes would have improved the safety of the voyages by reducing, on average, 9.8% time spent in rough weather, BF 5 or higher.

As businesses look to save every marginal cost that they can, even tackling niche issues such as ECAs and ECA management can have an impact on the bottom line.

A load of rubbish

The battle against maritime pollution is fought on multiple fronts, with garbage and ballast water included in the MEPC’s remit.

The impact of maritime plastic pollution is continuing to attract public scrutiny, and in December 2022 MEPC adopted a resolution that means more ships will have to keep logs on what they are throwing away. The resolution MEPC.360(79) contains amendments to MARPOL Annex V, expanding the requirement for a garbage record book by lowering the threshold down to ships of 100 gross tonnage and above (from the current threshold 400 gross tonnage and above).

This has been done in an effort to expand tracking and reporting of accidental discharges to the sea that may involve plastics.

As the saying goes: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”, and this also applies to the management of ballast water, with its risks of spreading invasive species. MEPC 79 has updated the Ballast Water Record Book (BWRB), with changes that “require a more detailed and standardised reporting of ballast water operations”.

Crews already have a huge amount of actions and data to keep records on, and as we can see, the reporting burden is increasing all the time. This is why NAPA Logbook is continually evolving to stay ahead of regulation, to ensure that crew can easily manage environmental reporting by automating log entries and record-keeping.

Moreover, as a digital logbook, it allows teams to use the information they gather to find new insights and efficiencies, rather than leaving valuable data on paper.

This trend is one that we believe will define 2023 – and the rest of the decade – in terms of maritime technology. One of the biggest breakthroughs will be the movement of essential data to the cloud.

It’s now possible to bring stability and logbook data to the cloud and create a shared view, and shared body of knowledge between the crew and the shoreside teams. This makes it possible to plan and manage day-to-day operations better to reduce risks, but also means that in emergency situations, teams can make decisions much faster, with shoreside and onboard crews working from the same source of real-time information.

A major driver of this is the fact that electronic logbooks are becoming more widespread, and realising their potential as universal data-capturing tools, digitalising crucial information and feeding it into operations.

What we are seeing with garbage and ballast water logbooks can and will play out with all areas of operations, from voyage performance data, to the management of hotel loads on cruise ships.

In conclusion, we’re all still excited for the main event at MEPC80. But sometimes it’s worth paying close attention to the warm-up act. Outcomes from MEPC79 can still hold important lessons on regulatory trends and how smart owners, operators and charterers can set themselves up to prepare for more major shifts.