Global shipping industry emissions
with ICCT's Bryan Comer
How big of a climate problem is the shipping industry?
If the international shipping sector were a country, it would be the sixth largest emitting nation in the world. Every year, 11 billion tons of goods – about 80% of all the goods we use or consume – reach us by ship, emitting nearly a billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in the process. And, about 40% of those goods – nearly 4.5 billion tons – are fossil fuels.
Climate Now sat down with Bryan Comer, Marine Program Lead at The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) to discuss the industry’s decarbonization goals, the policy changes needed to reach them, and the innovations most likely to help. Unlike renewable energy and electric road vehicles, there is not an obvious short-term economic benefit to decarbonizing shipping, which makes even the simplest solutions (like slowing down the ships!) difficult to incentivize. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done! Listen to the full episode with Bryan.
Running Time: 3 mins
Date: 05.06.2022
Watch Video
Featuring:
Bryan Comer
Marine Program Lead at the International Council on Clean Transportation
Bryan Comer
Marine Program Lead at the International Council on Clean Transportation
Bryan is a lead author of the Fourth International Maritime Organization Greenhouse Gas Study and is an expert on Arctic shipping issues, including efforts to reduce black carbon emissions and the use of heavy fuel oil. Bryan’s work highlights how maritime transportation can transition away from fossil-fueled ships to zero emission vessels.
Related Media:
The shipping industry moves about 11 billion tons of stuff around the world each year. That’s about, 300 times more than what you move by aircraft, for instance, and those are the two main international freight transportation modes for getting across an ocean at least. And to move 11 billion tons of cargo, ships are emitting about a billion tons of carbon dioxide.
And if it were a country, the shipping sector would rank sixth, more than Germany. And it’s about on par with how much international aviation emits. They both emit about a billion tons of carbon dioxide. But most of the emissions from international aviation are associated with moving people back and forth and not so much on the cargo side.
Rail doesn’t even really enter into the equation in terms of the overall contribution to goods movement and transportation emissions on the global scale.
About 80% of total freight transportation by mass is carried by ship. A lot of people say 90%, it’s actually more like 80%. And that’s about 70% by value.
Containers ships, bulk carriers and oil tankers, those three ships account for over half of the emissions from the sector. There’s about 50,000-60,000 commercial ships that are big enough to really count. In total around the world, there’s hundreds of thousands of ships, but you have to sort of draw the line somewhere. So of those 50 to 60,000 ships, 5,000 are container ships. So about 10% of the fleet, and they’re responsible for about 25% of carbon dioxide emissions from the sector. And then we have bulk carriers. There’s about 10,000 of those and they are responsible for about a fifth of emissions and then oil tankers for about a six of emissions.
So the container ships are moving manufactured goods back and forth. You know, if you look around your office and look at all this stuff you have, quite a bit of it, maybe all of it, was moved at some point on a ship. But the other portion of the shipping industry that maybe doesn’t get as much attention is just how much fossil fuels are transported by ships. So we have bulk carriers and oil tankers, and those two are transporting coal and crude oil and petroleum products, diesel fuel. And about 40% of that 11 billion tons of cargo that’s moved is fossil fuels a little over three billion tons in the form of oil and oil products and then a little more than one in coal. So there’s actually quite a bit of the shipping industry that is dedicated just to moving fossil fuels from where they’re produced and refined to the areas in which they’re being used.
Sources:
Shipping Facts, Shipping and world trade: driving prosperity. International Chamber of Shipping. https://www.ics-shipping.org/shipping-fact/shipping-and-world-trade-driving-prosperity/
European Commission. Reducing emissions from the shipping sector. https://ec.europa.eu/clima/eu-action/transport-emissions/reducing-emissions-shipping-sector_en
Ritchie, H. 2020. Climate change and flying: what share of global CO2 emissions come from aviation? https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation
Subramanian, S. 2022. Forty percent of all shipping cargo consists of fossil fuels. Quartz. https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels/