Analysis of the Incentive for Slow Steaming in Chinese Sulfur Emission Control Areas

Abstract

The increasing concerns caused by marine environmental issues have aroused attention from international agencies and regional governments about the regulation of the amount of ship emissions. There are various measures and regulations to control shipping emissions, among which emission control areas (ECAs) have been recognized as an effective tool to restrict shipping emissions along coastlines. Realizing the serious damage caused by shipping emissions, the Chinese Ministry of Transport announced the establishment of sulfur emission control areas (SECAs) in 2015. However, the low SECA standards have aroused public concern about their effectiveness. This study analyzes the incentives for slow steaming in Chinese SECAs based on the existing research models of speed. A specific route from Shanghai to Los Angeles is chosen and the ship speeds inside and outside the SECA are simulated by minimizing the shipping company’s operating costs. By analyzing the simulated results and comparing different scenarios, it has been found that the current range of SECAs in China cannot induce speed differentiation behaviors. At the same time, a ratio of more than 7% (the ratio of SECA distance to the total round-trip distance) is proposed as effective for designing the SECA boundary. This study provides various guidelines on the designation of SECAs for international and regional marine policies.

Impacts of the Increasingly Strict Sulfur Limit on Compliance Option Choices: The Case Study of Chinese SECA

“…They found that slow steaming within SECAs slightly decreases operators' total costs and increases CO 2 emissions. Fan and Huang [11] discussed the slow steaming inside the Chinese SECA, which demonstrated the effectiveness of the Chinese sulfur limit. To summarize, slow steaming is an economic method to save energy costs due to the big price spread between low-and high-sulfur bunkers, hence slow steaming is necessary to be considered in the fuel-switching option.…”

“…In addition to the above-mentioned studies, some researchers have analyzed the effects of slow steaming on emission abatement [11,34,36,37]. Doudnikoff and Lacoste [14] examined the effects of speed reduction inside SECAs by solving a cost-minimizing model with heuristic approach.…”

“…Similar to Fan and Huang [11], the following parameters of Table 1 are used in the model. It is noteworthy that the index i = 1 and i = 2 are used to indicate fuel-switching and scrubber system options, respectively.…”

“…The global sulfur limit and Chinese SECA will be identical after 2020, which makes the enforcement of Chinese SECA unnecessary. Some researchers argued that China's regulations of SECA should comply with international standards accordingly, which means that a stricter standard should be established [3,4,[11][12][13][14] Therefore, the Chinese government is negotiating a stricter sulfur limit for its SECA, which makes it necessary to investigate the impacts of this increasingly stricter sulfur policy in China. In addition, operators and researchers have to consider the effects of changing policies on shipping operations [6,11].…”

Bi-Objective Optimization of Vessel Speed and Route for Sustainable Coastal Shipping under the Regulations of Emission Control Areas

“…The ECA regulations require the operator to switch to expensive low-sulfur fuels, and thus have great side effects on many aspects of shipping operations; namely, speed and route [22][23][24].…”