Last week I joined the Enabling Green Shipping Corridors panel at the 2nd Port Electrification Australia conference in Sydney, alongside Andrew Dickson of the Energy Futures Foundation and two academic colleagues, Elnaz Irannezhad of UNSW Sydney and Professor Michael Bell of the University of Sydney, who moderated.
My thanks to the organisers, Global Transmission Report, for an insightful day, rightly focused on shore power, electric drayage and new fuels. My contribution was the step that comes before all of them: planning the port call. I appreciated the opportunity to explain my participation in the International Task Force Port Call Optimisation, and to share what I learned at the PCO Network meeting in Bremerhaven in September.
IMO’s Just-in-Time Arrival Guide estimates that a ship can spend five to ten per cent of its time waiting to enter port. An IMO GreenVoyage2050 containership study estimates fuel savings from a fully just-in-time voyage at around 14 per cent.
A desktop exercise on the 247-nautical-mile Bremerhaven–Rotterdam leg found 23 per cent. These are studies rather than live results, but the scale is hard to ignore. Ships still race across the ocean to wait at anchor.
The cause is not really technical. It is behavioural. The whole port call is planned around the ship’s ETA, which is only an estimate. Every party adds a buffer, and the master’s safest choice is to arrive early.
Ships wait for ports, ports wait for ships, and nobody plans together. The shift that matters is from ETA to PTA. The port publishes a time it will genuinely be ready, and the ship adjusts its speed to meet it. Technology carries the message, but management decides on the commitment.
In Bremerhaven, the mood had moved from agreeing a standard to building it. The Port Call Optimisation Guide, endorsed by about 40 organisations including IAPH, BIMCO, ICS and the World Bank, asks each port to publish four items: terminal and berth identifiers, planned arrival at the pilot boarding place, and planned departure from the berth.
The guide is voluntary and IMO guidelines on port nautical information are targeted for 2028. An open testbed run by the International Hydrographic Organisation validates each port’s implementation. The meeting drew 48 participants and 13 ports, all from Europe or North Africa. I was the only participant from Australia or New Zealand.
Nor is this only for well-resourced ports. Tema, in Ghana, brought its maritime authority, border agencies, terminals and agents into one room. There they agreed eight process changes and common timestamps. Tema is now targeting a cut in berth idle time from about 4.5 hours to two within a year. The first gains came from agreement, not software.
IAPH already has more than 13 ports, including Singapore and Busan, exchanging these times in pairs. A caution heard in Bremerhaven applies here: a correct time that arrives as the pilot boards cannot change a ship’s speed.
Australia and New Zealand can act without new infrastructure. The first step is to publish the four items through the testbed. Next, pilot a coastal or trans-Tasman port pair less than three days’ sailing apart, where the value is highest. Then measure behaviour rather than technology: how early the plan is published, how close it is to what actually happened, and whether every call is covered, not just the easy ones.
The cheapest fuel on a green corridor is the fuel a ship never burns waiting. Our region isn't in the room yet, and the question I left the panel with still stands: which Australian port will publish its plan first?
