Emissions compliance data can deliver efficiency and a competitive advantage

COLLECTING data to meet emissions regulations is good for business, two guests from 90POE tell listeners to this latest Lloyd’s List Intelligence podcast. Dhara Patel, Head of Product Performance at the maritime technology provider, 90POE — a name that reflects shipping’s role in transporting 90% of everything — and its Senior Advisor for Performance, Dimitris Argyros, argue that the data that must be collected and reported to meet IMO and regional regulators can also give shipowners and operators significant commercial advantages. Mr Argyros refers to a number of regulations that rely on fuel consumption — and thus emissions — data, in particular for IMO’s Data Collection System (DCS) and the EU’s Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) Regulation. Complying with the latter effectively provides a licence to operate, he says. Ms Patel also acknowledges the operational significance of these regulatory requirements, saying that when talking to fleet managers, it is “really striking... how quickly the conversation is shifting from a compliance conversation to a... financial budgeting conversation.” Those discussions find a particular focus around the need for a “clear strategy around emissions” to avoid the penalties for non-compliance with, in particular, the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). For a large fleet, these could amount to millions of euros per year, she says. At least with the EU ETS and its FuelEU Maritime regulation, their application is clear, Mr Argyros says. Based on factors including a carbon price coupled with compliance penalties or surpluses, “it’s quite easy to quantify [their] impact,” he says. But when it comes to the IMO’s annual Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII), “it gets a bit more interesting”, because vessels with lower ratings are less attractive in the market, he says, with charter parties often requiring a ship to be returned with the same CII rating as when it was delivered. Ms Patel offers some comments in the podcast based on feedback from compliance managers who are “having to deal with multiple reporting frameworks simultaneously” while managing emissions, planning voyages and optimising their commercial planning, which “leads to an increased demand in having the right data near real time”. She believes that this is where platforms such as 90 POE’s OpenOcean STUDIO can simplify management of multiple systems, each generating their own data that might be stored in separate siloes. By making all this accessible, she says that the data that has been collected for compliance can be used to discern “real time actionable insights.” This approach will be especially significant in the future, Mr Argyros suggests, as new fuels come into use and if IMO tightens its CII thresholds. Looking ahead, he is not hopeful of IMO and EU emissions requirements becoming aligned, “and that’s the real challenge,” he concludes.