Shipping vs Airfreight revisited: Some more considerations
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA on 03.11.07
The environment blog over at New Scientist has just revisited the shipping versus airfreight debate that we covered here. Just to refresh your memories, this was a story that the Guardian reported on, claiming that shipping produces 2.5 times the amount of emissions that airlines create. Interestingly, New Scientist takes a slightly different angle on why aviation is getting so much stick, while shipping remains relatively untouched by protests. Aside from the fact that aviation is set to grow faster than shipping, NS also points out that the aviation industry is easier to pressure than the shipping industry. While many airlines are recognized high-profile brands, it’s a fairly safe bet that most consumers could not name too many freight ship operators or manufacturers.
However, this leaves aside a big question, touched on in our comments section, regarding emissions by weight of cargo e.g. if the same amount of freight was shipped by air or by sea, which would produce more greenhouse gases? It seems, looking at the numbers, that shipping comes way ahead of airlines on this count. When this author was working out a carbon offset scheme for a previous employer, using Climate Care's calculations, shipping 1.5 tonnes of product by ship to the UK created 0.124 tonnes of CO2, while shipping only 0.5 tonnes of the same product by air created 4.5 tonnes of CO2. So, while John’s original recommendation to buy local in his post still stands, if it is a question between shipping cargo by ship or by plane, then it looks like the ship wins every time, at least if these numbers are to be believed.
One interesting concept on all this is the FEET index (The Foreign Exchange Earnings per Transport ton of CO2 ) that was produced by Bioregional Development Group as a means of balancing trade as a development tool versus greenhouse gas emissions. It basically argued that foreign trade was fine, but that you should measure goods by a combination of how much co2 they emit in shipping, versus how much economic benefit they brought to the producer countries – high value, non-perishable goods like wine, craft items etc that could be shipped by sea came out very well. Software and intellectual property came out extremely well. Tourism sucked. Cheap bulk commodities like wood and charcoal sucked. We've been unable to find many details on the FEET index online, but it is featured in the book, Bioregional Solutions for Living on One Planet.
So, Shipping by water is 109 times less polluting than air transport, using Climate Care's numbers. Shouldn't that be the story?
One more reason to pause and think before buying vegetables, fruits and flowers that have to be flown in, or for that matter, having things sent by overnight delivery. And plenty of reasons to try to source products, particularly bulk goods, locally.
I wonder what the embodied energy, or lifetime energy use of an airplane is, versus a large container ship? Aluminum versus steel, turbine engines versus internal combustion, speed versus volume.
Airplanes also release their pollutants in the stratosphere, where their behavior and decay has different environmental impacts, relative to emmissions released at sea level.
The Port of LA has a program to provide docked ships with grid electricity. Amazingly, this had not been done earlier, and ships previously kept their main engines running for the enitre time they were in port, greatly contributing to local air pollution and wasting enormous amounts of fuel. I wonder if this is being adopted in more ports now? But this, while important to do, probably adresses less than five percent of total fuel use and emissions by ships.
Also a very good point to think through the political and social implications or where and how various goods and materials originate, and trying to improve their outcomes.
But what resonates for me is the insupportable extravagance and damage caused by the mounting tonnages shipped by air.
I'm sure that ocean and riverine shipping could benefit greatly from improvements in energy efficiency and reduction of pollutants. Ships and their equipment have service lives of about 20 years, so increased efficiency and emmissions controls can be phased in. Since ship engines run on heavy fuel oil, they ought to be highly responsive to rising fuel costs. But I'm not sure it could be 109 times better.
The shipping industry has been focused on reducing the total cost/ton equation, to be competitive, expand markets and increase profits. Beyond institutional inertia, they have to factor in resistance to increasing costs of new equipment, and any increased difficulties in servicing and maintaining more sophisticated engines and pollution controls. Ship owners finance ships differently from fuel purchases, and incremental increases in fuel costs are more readily absorbed than new capital costs.
Care should be taken that emission regs are not structured so that they result in old, poorly performing ships being kept in service longer to elude the new regulations. This could be a place for tradeable pollution credits to have an impact.
So the simplest, greatest improvement is to not ship by air. There's no need to consider this an either/or condition, just like power plants have emission controls, and so do autos. Emphasizing limits on airborn emissions by ensuring that only truly critical transport functions are handled by aircraft, and then focusing on substantial, incremental improvements in waterborne shipping will make the largest contributions.
Improving the efficiency of waterborne shipping will also further improve the competitive advantages it already has over aircraft.
Phase One of our NPO has been gaining steam and when we start Phase Two, our method of shipping will produce ZERO carbon emissions. We are a sailing vessel utilizing photovoltaic technology that will soon transport fair trade products and aid.
I invite comments on our Project. If you would like to assist, please don't hesitate to email.
Chris Kozak
Tokyo Administrator
Greenheart Project
You can check on a good article about CO2 emissions due to shipping what are emitted CO2 quantities (gramme of CO2 per metric ton.km) on
http://www.cship.eu
Good news for the ZERO carbon shipping project.
Until this can be the most used shipping vessel, you can offset your CO2 emissions due to shipping using
CShip
This question is very relevant to New Zealands agricultural exports. We export a lot of food (dairy, meat, fruit etc) overseas including 25000km away to Europe. Recently NZ exports have been bagged by British farming organisations because they have lots of "food miles" associated with them. In reality the vast majority of our exports are shipped (not airfreighted) and even with the emissions for shipping, most of our exports (ie to the UK) have considerably lower CO2 emissions overall than food produced (more intensively) in the UK itself. 25000km of shipping emits about as much as 800km of trucking I have read somewhere.
Not that we should be complacent. The concerns that the shipping industry have not done as much as they could have are fair. They use very dirty fuel, pay no taxes on them and their emissions are excluded from being counted in the Kyoto protocol.
There are some rays of hope - such as this company:
http://www.skysails.info/index.php?L=1
Benjamin