TUGS & TOWING
DILEMMA: WHICH FUEL SHOULD TUGOWNERS BACK? The future is far from certain when it comes to investing in the future fuels for tug and all vessel - owners. A recent conference looked at the options. When the question ‘Can tugs decarbonise by 2050?’ was asked at the British Tugowners Association meeting in Hampshire, UK recently, about seven or eight hands went up in agreement. In an audience numbering around 70 it wasn’t an encouraging response. But it’s a question that needs to be addressed, and, opening the conference, BTA Chairman Scott Baker, also Head of Marine Standards at Svitzer, expanded on the dilemma facing tugowners. ”What will the alternative, transitional fuel of choice be for our sector?” he asked. ”What will the infrastructure requirements look like, what will they cost and what will all this have on the shipowner’s training budget?” Future fuels today There is certainly no shortage of contenders, and as Kerrie Forster, CEO of the Workboat Association, told Maritime Journal, many are already in use. “Currently the industry fuel of choice (within the 500gt market) is common diesel, which is supported frequently already by electricity,” he said. “Though in the wider maritime industry, there is a larger range of fuel currently used within Britain’s ports. Heavy fuel oil, diesel, petrol, LNG, bio-fuel, electricity and hydrogen are all already in use. “On top of this, we see designs for ammonia and methanol requirements and alternatives to the current fuels, for example liquid hydrogen and high-voltage electricity. “The fuel of the future could well be hydrogen gas. The technology is already there, the pressures needed to contain it are not outside reason, the storage conditions are not extreme, the alchemy with water does not pose such a dangerous threat and importantly, there is an option to make it in a nearly net-0% fossil resource dependent way. “But hydrogen is only currently being used in a diesel-mix scenario. In today’s statistics it’s a very good way to lower emissions by lowering the diesel content and a good way to flatten the curve of diesel reliance – but it isn’t yet allowing net-zero vessels.” Hydrogen frontrunner Maritime and Coastguard Agency Chief Executive Brian Johnson was very clear in his presentation on where he saw the future fuel for shipping. “LNG has no impact on global warming,” he said. “Biofuels are not an option, they are unscalable and we would need 50% more land to grow them on. Batteries have a hopeless energy density. Methanol has carbon in it anyway and to make it zero carbon you’d need to suck CO2 out of the air. Plants need 1m3 of air processed per second in carbon capture to achieve this. “It has to be pressurised hydrogen as a long-term solution, and in electric hybrids, a mix of the two. The technology is pretty much there already. In 15-20 years’ time we might be looking at nuclear, but this doesn’t have public support.” It won’t be a simple step to take, Johnson told delegates. It needs a system change and market financing measures, and infrastructure is a huge challenge, not to mention regulations
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– or lack of them – on new fuels that behave very differently. Lack of regulation, for boat owners and builders, is at the heart of the problem: without regulations in place, boat builders do not know where to invest. Svitzer: Fuel agnostic International tugboat giant Svitzer has publicly revealed its intentions to be carbon neutral by 2040, already having put in place a number of strategies to help drive the mission forward – such as changing the fuel mix of its fleet. In London, Felixstowe and Southampton, its entire fleets, it says, have switched to biofuels, and the company has begun to look at retrofitting or renewing all of its ships. “Our oldest tug is 61 years old,” said Head of Decarbonisation Dr Gareth Prowse, “and the average age of the rest of them is 46 years. It would be a retrofit challenge but if Svitzer could make its fleet carbon neutral, it would be the equivalent of taking 15,000 cars off the road. “We are trying to be fuel agnostic, so Svitzer is making ships that could switch to being dual fuelled. But the problem with future fuels is that they are either expensive, have a lower energy density or are not available. We are taking a step into the unknown and it’s not yet cost effective. You need to match the fuel requirement and powertrain with operational profile.” 8 Kerrie Forster, Workboat Association
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