Assessing the role of short-sea shipping and ports in maritime well-to-wake emissions
Achmad Mustakim, John Mangan, Roberto Palacín
Abstract
Analysing the carbon footprint of short-sea shipping and ports within the context of total end-to-end maritime emissions is important to help understand both their relative contributions and how they can be reduced. Focusing on the container mode, this study develops a bottom-up, well-to-wake/wheel (WtW) model to comprehensively assess the carbon footprint of short-sea shipping and port operations. This paper utilised two contrasting short-sea container shipping case studies: Tyne - Rotterdam (Europe) and Semarang - Singapore (Asia). In Case Study 1 (Europe), with an average roundtrip distance of 694 nautical miles (NM), total emissions were distributed: shipping at-sea 47.3%, shipping in-port at 32.7% and port operations at 20%. In Case Study 2 (Asia), with a longer average roundtrip distance of 1,849 NM, total emissions were distributed: shipping at-sea 70.1%, shipping in-port at 18%, and port operations at 11.9%. These findings highlight that the port operations emissions share is higher in shorter shipping corridors. The predominance of shipping emissions in both corridors suggests ports could have more impact on enabling short-sea shipping decarbonisation by supporting alternative fuels and promoting operational strategies such as virtual arrival. The proposed model is especially valuable for ports, where standardised methods for estimating their emissions remain limited.