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Should have gone to Specsavers: Co-benefits of addressing sulphur and carbon emissions
Gilbert, P
In: 3rd International Conference on Technologies, Operations, Logistics and Modelling for Low Carbon Shipping; 09 Sep 2013-10 Sep 2013; UCL, London. 2013.
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Abstract
The International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) Marpol Annex VI stipulates that from the 1st January 2015, the maximum allowable sulphur content of marine fuel combusted in the North West European Waters Emission Control Area (ECA) will be 0.1%. Outside of ECAs Marpol Annex VI will also limit global marine fuel sulphur content to 0.5% by 2020. Although sulphur regulation is considered to be a significant hurdle for the sector, arguably the bigger challenge facing not just shipping, but the whole of society, is climate change. Despite this, the sector has made limited progress to address its rising carbon emissions and will have to significantly improve existing measures to cut its global share. With such unprecedented change to the conventional means of marine fuel combustion there appears a window of opportunity to address co-benefits of tackling cumulative CO2 emissions and localised SOx emissions. However, the three options to comply with sulphur regulation (low sulphur distillates, LNG and scrubbing) do little to address the climate challenge. The sector is taking a short-sighted approach to the problem. To address this, the sector should look to delay its commitments to the sulphur regulations and instead introduce a co-ordinated suite of policies that deal with CO2 and SOx emissions in tandem. This would reduce unintended rebound effects such as infrastructure lock-in and ensure the lower carbon technology measures are not locked-out in the longer-term. More radical, step-change technologies, albeit less developed now, could be introduced from the outset, to ensure that the sector is able to step up to the climate challenge.