This scientific study aims to compare the significance of onboard positioning of two different classes of wind propulsion systems for retrofit installations to maximize fuel and emissions savings. The study focuses on comparing the performance a low lift-to-drag ratio wind propulsion system, the Rotor Sail, and a high lift-to-drag ratio one, the DynaRig, installed at different places on a real 84000 DWT bulk carrier ship to identify the most efficient placement of these two distinct systems to achieve maximum fuel efficiency. The investigation involves a comprehensive analysis of available deck spaces, and performance prediction program modeling is employed to estimate potential fuel savings for a typical route followed by the vessel. The results show that placing the WPS far forward, close to the hydrodynamic centre of lateral resistance, results in overall higher savings. Both WPS classes see a penalty when placed far from the hydrodynamic centre of lateral resistance, reducing their overall savings potential. However, Rotor Sails are more adversely affected due to their enhanced side force generation per unit thrust. Consequently, the placement of Rotor Sails becomes crucial, especially under upwind conditions, while DynaRigs prove more versatile for installations in the aft. This research provides valuable insights into enhancing the ship's energy efficiency and reducing its environmental impact in the maritime industry.
Uncertainties on the global availability and affordability of alternative marine fuels are stalling the shipping sector’s decarbonization course. Several candidate measures are being discussed at the International Maritime Organization, including market-based measures (MBMs) and environmental policies such as carbon taxes and emissions trading systems, as means to decarbonize. Their implementation increases the cost of fossil fuel consumption and provides fiscal incentives to shipping stakeholders to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions reductions. MBMs can bridge the price gap between alternative and conventional fuels and generate revenues for funding the up-scaling of alternative fuels’ production, storage and distribution facilities and, thus, enhance their availability. By estimating the fuels’ implementation and operational costs and carbon abatement potential, this study calculates marginal abatement costs and estimates the level of carbon pricing needed to render investments into alternative fuels cost-effective. The results can assist policymakers in establishing robust and effective maritime decarbonization policies.
Purpose: In the shipping industry, both sales and purchases of second-hand ships and freight transport services are prevalently tailor-made and traded with intense bilateral negotiations. Price bargaining is the key step of this negotiation process and plays a crucial role in determining mutually agreed prices. Despite its cruciality and applicability, the price bargaining has yet received due conceptual and/or theoretical attention in the shipping literature. This paper attempts to conceptually examine the role of bargaining in shipping transaction prices and subsequently puts forward directions for future research. In doing so, the paper focuses on two types of transactions taking place in shipping markets: asset market trading of second-hand vessels and service market trading shipping freights.
Design/methodology/approach: The paper begins with a systematic literature review of price bargaining in the field of economics and management disciplines from a game-theoretic perspective. This approach does logically lead to the establishment of a conceptual framework for price bargaining in shipping sub-markets as a step toward having taken into consideration a variety of heterogeneities commonly present in trading activities and market dynamics.
Findings: A set of research areas has been consequently identified where price bargaining and mechanisms for the shipping freight and asset markets could be further explored and analyzed in a way to make better pricing decisions under a more tangible framework.
Research limitations/implications: One of the critical challenges when using bargaining mechanisms to make a decision on pricing shipping services and assets is how to operationalize the study for empirical investigation as some of the factors are internal information of the players and are not adequately revealed to externals: that is, an imperfect information sharing case. The current study aims, however, not to conduct an empirical analysis but to initiate a conversation among maritime economists by bringing their attention to this not-yet fully explored and potentially impactful field of research and by asking them to treat bargaining from a perspective for pricing shipping assets and services. It is claimed that, by doing so, one could better understand price differences between individual contracts.
Originality/value: This study would be considered the first in its kind to provide a detailed survey of the bargaining theory and models from a game theoretical perspective as a theoretical lens to understand its importance and relevance in pricing shipping assets and services. It also provides a simplified operational case on utilizing bargaining in practically pricing freight services.
This PhD thesis examines the role of market-based measures (MBMs) in incentivizing international shipping greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions to leverage the decarbonization efforts of the International Maritime Organization (IMO). The research motivation sprang from the Initial IMO Strategy, which, among other climate ambitions, envisages at least a 50% curb of GHG emissions until 2050 vis-a-vis 2008 levels. The regulatory framework involves several candidate measures, including MBMs, i.e., environmental policies like carbon taxes and emissions trading systems (ETS) that enforce the "polluter-pays" principle, and thus provide fiscal incentives to stakeholders to eliminate their carbon footprint.
The assessment of MBMs as means of decarbonizing shipping is based on three main pillars: their economic efficiency, their environmental effectiveness, and their climate policy design. Compliance with carbon pricing regimes can entail the adoption of both operational measures, such as speed reduction, route reconfiguration, or voyage optimization techniques, and technological measures like the uptake of zero-carbon technologies and alternative marine fuels. Due to this wide range of conformity practices, this thesis assesses several short- and long-term responses to MBMs in order to encapsulate their cost effectiveness in relation to their carbon abatement potential.
From a climate policy design perspective, the two most prominent types of MBMs are the carbon taxes, a fixed-price approach that provides carbon price certainty, and the ETSs, a fixedquantity system that secures that GHG emissions levels are met. At first, the study evaluates the prospects of a carbon levy to achieve GHG emissions reductions by analyzing the macroeconomic effects of freight rates and fuel prices in inducing slow steaming as an operational response to the MBM. The results show that market conditions influence the overall effectiveness of a tax and that the attained reductions, although significant, are insufficient to reach the 50% decarbonization targets. Moreover, considering the imminent inclusion of the maritime sector into the EU ETS, the thesis examines the scenario of liner shipping operators opting for route reconfigurations as an operational response to a regional ETS. The outputs reveal that replacing EU ports with nearby non-EU competitor ports becomes cost-effective for minimal EU carbon prices. The action would result in carbon leakage, EU ETS evasion, loss of EU ETS revenue, and penalization of the EU ports.
To the extent that MBMs induce technological changes, this thesis evaluates the level of carbon pricing needed to close the price gap between alternative and conventional marine fuels. The analysis considers the capital and operational costs for implementing and utilizing alternative marine fuels onboard and develops their marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs) to evaluate their cost-competitiveness and carbon abatement spectrum. The analysis indicates that to reach full maritime decarbonization, fuels such as green liquid hydrogen and their supporting technology, as of today’s cost estimations, would require a carbon price of up to 700 USD/MT CO2e to become cost-competitive.
The thesis concludes that accounting for a well-to-wake scope of emissions will create the right
incentives for developing sustainable alternative marine fuel production pathways to facilitate
shipping’s future energy demand. Revenues from MBMs will be substantial and can accelerate
R&D, scale-up the availability of alternative fuels, subsidize "fist-movers" and green ships and
reverse possible detrimental effects of carbon pricing to developing countries such as the Least
Developed Countries (LDCs) and the Small Island Developing States (SIDS).
The world is witnessing a growth in economic nationalism, especially in countries like the United States and United Kingdom, where this would scarcely have been predicted a few years ago. These developments threaten the internationalization of services and gains made through various global trading arrangements. Moreover, there are concerns that the COVID-19 pandemic will further undermine supranational forms of governance and nurture the trend towards protectionism and economic nationalism. We undertake a systemic literature review on economic nationalism and services internationalization to identify research themes. The findings of the study have implications for policymakers, and we provide directions for future research.
What is the role of the sea in globalized capitalism? In their new book Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World, Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás explore this question through a historical and geographical lens. In this book, the authors track the larger history of maritime commerce and pursue new understandings of the role of the sea in the global economy. In doing so, they illuminate the understudied maritime spaces, systems, and flows that underpin the global economy and create the foundations of global material circulation.
The year 2020 was largely defined by the unprecedented disruption caused by Covid-19 pandemic, which could have lasting adverse effects on every corners of human life. In the meanwhile, the pandemic has fundamentally changed the way of how industrial enterprises operate, empowering businesses to accelerate their digital transformation and reshaping their business models. Throughout the pandemic, shipping has been essential in terms of guaranteeing the global supply chain linkage and economic interdependency. As the world moves toward recovery, the maritime industry is also stepping up to the challenge and responds to these extraordinary disruptions. Against this background, a thorough, broader, and new review of maritime businesses will be particularly important.
“The Maritime Industry 2030” was the kick-off conference for the Maritime Research Alliance (MRA), which was recently established in cooperation between seven Danish universities and two Danish maritime professional academies. This report summarizes the discussions at the conference and broader important maritime industry issues as well as presents the goals of MRA.
There have been several calls from private foundations, industry associations and governmental agencies to map out and to extensively coordinate cross-disciplinary maritime research in Denmark. MRA is an initiative that strengthens existing and creates new collaborative relationships across the universities and maritime academies, in part as a response to such calls. The most important aims of MRA are to:
1. Find solutions to those challenges to the maritime sector that require cross-disciplinary ventures
2. Create a critical mass of expertise in Denmark for maritime and related topics
3. Be a visible and viable one-point-of-contact to academic involvement and output for the industry
4. Attract attention nationally and internationally for Danish maritime research and education
5. Make Danish universities and maritime academies attractive partners for international cooperation on maritime and related projects
About the conference-report:
The “Maritime Industry 2030” conference was an international and joint researcher/practitioner event held at the Copenhagen Business School during 5-6 February 2018.
The first day of the conference was an open event organized with the aim of bringing industry and academia together to identify and discuss the most important issues facing the maritime industry in the near term towards 2030 and to lay a firm foundation for closer cross-disciplinary collaboration for addressing these issues.
The second day of the conference was a closed event for MRA members organized with the aim to reflect on the identified issues, determine the future focus and direction of MRA and initiate specific collaborative research projects.
The conference was kindly supported by the Danish Maritime Fund. In 2020 the fund supported the establishment of the Maritime Research Alliance based on, among other, future cross-disciplinary research themes and ideas that were identified at the conference.
In the European Union, Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) has been regarded as a means of promoting the sustainable growth of the blue economy. Consequently, where the planning outcomes affect the business operations in marine areas, commercial and industry stakeholders should have an important role in the planning process. However, the business perspective in MSP has gained little attention in stakeholder involvement literature. The aim of this study is to elaborate on the business sector's interest and involvement in MSP in the Baltic Sea region. The findings are based on the first-hand experiences of MSP authorities and experts. Furthermore, perspectives from two sea-use sectors, maritime transport and marine tourism, have been investigated using online questionnaires to discover their views. The study focuses on the questions of who to involve and what are the driving forces promoting business sector involvement. Even though MSP is a form of broad-scale planning, the results indicate that all spatial and organizational scales from local to international and from small enterprises to umbrella organizations should be considered when designing approaches to business stakeholder participation. The planning authorities need to consider what are the benefits and challenges of involving different types of business stakeholders. Planners often rely on organizations that represent business stakeholders and individual companies. It is resource effective to interact with representatives as they are considered to have a broad and general knowledge of the respective sector's interests. However, in some cases it is beneficial to also integrate individual companies, especially in local or regional contexts.
Led by the UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the EU, the shipping industry struggles to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to align with the Paris Agreement. Clean Cargo, the leading voluntary buyer–supplier forum for sustainability in the cargo shipping industry, developed some years ago a methodology to calculate and report the GHG emissions from containerships. The recently introduced carbon emission requirements by the IMO and EU have reinforced the members’ interest in a new Clean Cargo reporting mechanism that enables a more effective and efficient monitoring of the decarbonization progress. A better understanding of the user needs accompanied by due consideration to the regulatory environment and the technological advances are key to build this new framework. This paper builds on the case of the Clean Cargo initiative to (1) identify the stakeholders’ expectations and motivations for voluntary disclosure of environmental information, and (2) discuss the governance challenges of voluntary initiatives. A questionnaire was designed and deployed to investigate the current uses of Clean Cargo data and the information sharing among different stakeholders. Voluntary schemes can speed up the decarbonization process by proposing standards accepted by all actors of the global value chain. Clean Cargo members envision reporting on absolute GHG emissions per shipment as the way forward.