WEATHERNEWS Americas has launched its new Carbon Intensity Monitoring service to provide reliable carbon emissions reporting and regulatory compliance for shipping.

Climate regulation compliance and the ability to precisely monitor individual vessel and fleet emissions is a big challenge for shipping companies, according to Weathernews Americas CEO Antonio Brizzo.

“Aligning shipping and chartering activities to be environmentally responsible is the ultimate goal of CIM, through measuring and reporting CO2 emissions from berth to berth, including the voyage legs under spot chartering,” he said.

CIM collects all required data via interactive reporting tools and provides multi-layered data verification for accurate calculation of a vessel’s Energy Efficiency Operational Indicator and CO2.

CIM’s automatic process to obtain a clean dataset reduces the burden on operators.

“We estimate this can save crews around 30 minutes per day, equivalent to 25 man-hours across a fleet of 50 vessels,” Mr Brizzo said.

CIM also provides easy and intuitive real-time EEOI visualisation providing instant feedback on CO2 reduction efforts.

“This will set the standard for best practice in monitoring emissions and reporting requirements,” he said.

CIM also guarantees seamless integration with Weathernews’ proprietary Optimum Ship Routeing service to optimise voyage fuel consumption – while also improving EEOI if the charter market is low.

Built using a proprietary distributed ledger database, the back end will entirely be based on blockchain to ensure traceability and transparency. This will allow the market to freely trace the exact amount and location of emissions from a single ship, a particular trade route, or the carbon intensity efficiency of a particular ship by means of its EEOI.

This not only enhances supply chain visibility but also enables stakeholders to satisfy increasingly stringent requirements for environmental, social and governance reporting – increasingly a key factor in boardrooms and for value-chain parties such as investors, banks and charterers.

“We aim to become the official scorekeeper of choice, and a recognised third-party entity to guarantee transparency and unbiased reporting,” Mr Brizzo said.

It is intended that the platform will initially be used by companies with a common interest in reducing CO2 emissions and a willingness to collaborate in a closed group.

“We are working with our partners to go live with this exciting initiative during 2021,” Mr Brizzo said.

UK to use satellites to track ship emissions

An initiative aiming to help track and reduce shipping’s carbon emissions is among five projects recently awarded UK-government funding through the country’s Space Agency.

The University of Leicester will use satellite analytics to track the greenhouse gas and pollution emissions of shipping fleets, ushering in a new approach that could help shipping companies to face down climate change.

The university will work with Redshift Associates Ltd to develop analytics to track the carbon and pollution emissions of ships, with a new approach to establish emission audits of shipping fleets and their individual vessels. The project builds upon previous work developing analytics solutions for ports and harbors, extending this to coastal and international waters.