Overview of ITF country analysis of decarbonisation policies in the Swedish transport industry

1. 40 | Baltic Transport Journal | 2/2019
T
he SSA was one of the first shipping
associations to commit to abso-
lute emission reduction targets.
Its Climate Roadmap, released
in 2015, presented the aim of reaching the
level of zero emissions of CO2
and other
harmful substances by 2050. This ambi-
tion builds upon SSA’s adoption in 2009 of
the EU Maritime Transport Strategy 2009-
2018 that lays down the long-term objectives
of carbon-neutral and no-waste seaborne
transportation. What’s more, the SSA’s cli-
mate targets form part of a larger strategy,
called Zero Vision, which also includes bold
Sweden’s good green shipping practices and what can the international community
The Swedish experience
by Gabrielė Vilemo Gotkovič
Although Sweden is a relatively small shipping nation – the Swedish Shipowners’ Association (SSA) currently
includes 56 members that together own some 400 vessels, of which around one-fourth flies the country’s
flag–itis,atthesametime,oneofthepioneerswhenitcomestodecarbonisationtheindustry.Inafollow-up
to its Decarbonising Maritime Transport. Pathways to zero-carbon shipping by 2035 report, the International
Transport Forum (ITF) has published The Case of Sweden, outlying numerous examples of the Swedes’
proactiveapproachtoenvironmentalprotectionand,inconsequence,whatotherflagstatescanlearnfromit.
#Inside
#hipping#Emissions#Decarbonisation
#Sweden#Bestpractices#LNG#Methanol
#Electricity#Onshorepowersupply
#Polluterpaysportfairwaydues
#GreenTransitionandCompetitiveness
#Transportpolicy#National#Global
objectives in the fields of safety, innovation,
and sustainable growth.
LNG, methanol, electricity, and co-op
with other industries
The Climate Roadmap’s intermediate
goal is a 30% emission reduction by 2030
achieved by such directly applicable means
as, i.a., switching to a less polluting bunker
or improving the ships’ energy efficiency
(read more in BTJ 6/18’s The rub of the green.
Zero-emission shipping by 2035). To that end,
the so-called Zero Vision Tool was estab-
lished, a platform specifically created to test
new, greener shipping technologies.
In result, Sweden has been among the
first countries to experiment on a wider
scale with gas-powered ships, both lique-
fied natural gas (LNG) and methanol, and
vessels running on electricity. Of these,
LNG has penetrated the market the most.
The Baltic Yearbook 2017/18 mentions Erik
Thun’s dry bulker Greenland, as well as
the oil/chemical carriers Fure West and
Fure Vinga of Furetank, and Terntank’s
Ternsund, Tern Sea, and Tern Ocean; mean-
while, Destination Gotland has received its
gas-powered ro-pax Visborg, whose sister
ship is to follow soon, whereas the list of
confirmed LNG-fuelled newbuilds prepared
by DNV GL includes six oil/chemical tank-
ers to join the Swedish pack in 2019, out
of which four will fly the colours of Thun
Tankers and two Älvtank’s.
Putting aside the well-known SOX
,
NOX
, and particulate matter emission
reductions (83-96%, 79-91%, and 80-84%,
respectively), LNG, though still a fossil
fuel, has also proved to deliver noticeable
gains on the CO2
lowering front – in the
range of 23-24%, according to the Zero
Vision Tool’s Pilot LNG Activity 7 Report.
At the same time, facilities for bunker-
ing LNG were established in Swedish
Photo: ForSea/Anders Ebefeldt

2. Sustainability
2/2019 | Baltic Transport Journal | 41
learn from them
ports – most recently by Swedegas in
Gothenburg, but, in fact, the first gas
bunkering vessel in the Baltic Sea region,
Seagas, was put in place in Stockholm by
AGA, a member of the Linde Group, trans-
porting the bunker from a small-scale
LNG terminal in Nynäshamn to supply
Viking Grace, the region’s first gas-run
cruise ferry that’s employed across the
Stockholm-Åland Islands-Turku stretch.
Sweden has also been at the forefront
of the development of methanol-pow-
ered ships. A few years ago, a €22m-big
pilot project was launched by Stena Line,
with support from the EU Motorways of
the Sea programme, to convert a ro-pax
and which resulted in Stena Germanica
becoming the world’s first ship in gen-
eral, and ferry in particular, to sail on
methanol. She plies between Gothenburg
and Kiel, and the bunker is supplied in
the former by Methanex, said to be the
largest methanol supplier worldwide. As
things stand today, the bunker is pro-
duced from natural gas, and therefore
its eco-friendliness potential isn’t fully
utilised. Stena Line is looking at ways to
develop production based on biomass in
order to lower the well-to-engine foot-
print. Throughout the project, the com-
pany has also developed a methanol ship
conversion toolkit if other shipping lines
would like to go down the methanol road.
While the pioneering conversion con-
sumed a lot of resources, Stena Line has
calculated that future methanol-retro-
fits could cost two-thirds less, provided
one decides to transition several ships
towards the use of methanol at once.
Lastly in this thread, Sweden has also
been one of the first countries to intro-
duce electric ships, both in domestic
and international traffic. The former
includes the Green City Ferries and
Waxholmsbolaget companies serving traf-
fic in the Stockholm archipelago, while
the latter the ForSea’s Tycho Brahe and
Aurora, serving the sea bridge between
Helsingborg and Helsingør, and which
were first converted to hybrid operations
to become fully-electric shortly after-
wards. Such projects require not only
refurbishing the ships with new equip-
ment but also installing charging stations
in ports, which, in turn, need to have a
proper connection to the grid. According
to the data provided by Schneider Electric,
using electricity to power ships, both in
Sweden and Denmark, is more environ-
mentally friendly than sailing on marine
gas oil (43.6 and 328.84, respectively, vs.
645 of CO2
g/kWh emissions).
Photo: Port of Gothenburg
Photo: ForSea/Anders Ebefeldt
Photo: Södra

3. 42 | Baltic Transport Journal | 2/2019
Yet, at the end of the day, decarbonising
the shipping industry depends on introduc-
ing eco-solutions across the entire logistics
chain. The SSA’s ultimate goal of zero emis-
sions by 2050 requires others to embrace
eco-innovative technological and logistical
solutions. Luckily, in many cases, shipping
and other industries in Sweden find them-
selves on the same page. One example is the
fact that many freight trains run triangu-
lar routes to avoid the traditional empty
backhaul problem. Another example comes
from the wood industry; Södra has engaged
in a system in which wood volumes are
exchanged with other producers that are
closer to end customers, hence unnecessary
transport movements are avoided (interest-
ingly, a similar approach has been adopted
by the Gothia Tanker Alliance, to which
the already mentioned LNG-embracing
Furetank, Thun Tankers, and Älvtank are
subscribed to).
The green transition
According to the ITF, Sweden is the only
country with a truly environmentally differ-
entiated, polluter pays fairway dues system,
in place since 1998 and applicable to all ves-
sels, where the cleaner ships pay less and the
dirtier ones – more. Other “green” port fee
schemes simply grant a rebate to the ships
calling to a port and that happen to pollute
the environment to a lesser degree.
Next, Swedish ports (Gothenburg,
Piteå, Karlskrona, Ystad, Trelleborg, and
Stockholm) were among the first in the world
to introduce onshore power supply (OPS)
facilities,firstlow-andthenhigh-voltage,that
allow ships to use electricity from the grid
and turn off their auxiliary engines when at
berth. This policy has been supported at the
national government level by an exemption
of the electricity tax for OPS.
The country has also been working on
bringing innovation to how regulatory
affairs are handled. The sector used to be
over-regulated, with very detailed rules
that constrained flexibility and ham-
pered a greater uptake of innovation.
The idea of function-based regulation,
Swedish Transport Agency’s Regulations
and General Advice on Ships in National
Maritime Traffic, rests on having only a
handful of functional requirements in
addition to general advice and some com-
plementary information.
In June 2017, the government presented
a climate law with a target of zero net green-
house gas emissions by 2045 – the so-called
Photo: Furetank Photo: Baltic Workboats/Robert Levin
Photo: ForSea/Anders Ebefeldt Photo: Destination Gotland/Segerberg Media
Photo: Skangas

4. Sustainability
2/2019 | Baltic Transport Journal | 43
Green Transition and Competitiveness
policy – which was supported by seven of
the eight political parties in the parliament.
The new law sets an emission pathway with
intermediate targets. The parliament will be
notified on the progress through periodic
reports; a climate policy council will assess
whether government policies are compat-
ible with the national climate objectives;
whilst a special expert group will work on
developing visions to achieve the govern-
ment’s targets.
The climate law includes a sector-spe-
cific emission reduction target for domes-
tic transport: 70% less CO2
emissions in
2030 vs. 2010. This target, however, isn’t
further broken down into specific modes.
Yet, as more than 90% of the domestic
transport emissions in Sweden are from
road traffic, and that energy efficiency,
electrification, using more bio-fuels, and
lowering overland transport demand
can do only as much, a considerable por-
tion of road freight traffic will have to be
shifted onto vessels serving the Swedish
cabotage traffic. By way of example, last
autumn, Lindbäcks, a Swedish industrial
producer of wood-made houses, tested
sea transports between north- and south-
ern Sweden for its 175 flat-big construc-
tion project in Lund instead of sending
the shipment by truck all the way from
Piteå. “[There are] benefits we can draw
by using the sea for transports. It’s good
to decrease road traffic as well as to have
the vessel loaded in both ways, which
results in environmental and economic
gains,” Lars Wallgren, Logistics Manager,
Lindbäcks, commented.
Green shipping shouldn’t be a luxury
All of this sounds quite inspiring, that
is if you’re a shipowner fond of what the
Swedes are doing – and have the spare
money to pay for the green royalties.
Truth be told, for many years there has
been a considerable opposition within
the International Maritime Organization
(IMO) to do something meaningful with
the industry’s carbon footprint (read more
in BTJ 3-4/18’s Shipping, IMO, and the
cosy bed they made. The complicated road
to environmental shipping targets). Only
thanks to a wide public outcry and a few
brave in the IMO, including the Swedes,
things have been gradually shifting from
the ‘let us continue sailing on the tax-
exempted and polluting heavy fuel oil’
to ‘maybe we should actually reflect on
the position sea shipping occupies in the
grander scheme of things.’ Still, there’s only
so much that states or even entire regions
can do in isolation. Upscaling good prac-
tices to a global level is hence necessary for
a substantial reduction of GHG emissions
to take place.
Among others, analysts from the ITF rec-
ommend that there should be more financial
tools and incentives available to support
the decarbonisation of shipping. The Green
Shipping Guarantee Programme, a joint
initiative of the European Investment Bank
(EIB) and the all-round Dutch bank ABN
Amro, is one way of doing this. Recently, a
total of €10.1m has been made available to
the Eureka Shipping group for the construc-
tion of three cement carriers. The vessels will
be designed to be more eco-friendly than
the company’s existing ships as well as in
comparison to other cement carriers plying
in European waters. All three newbuilds, to
fly an EU flag, will be built and operated in
compliance with IMO and EU regulations
and will serve trade in the north of Europe
within the Sulphur Emission Control Areas
of the Baltic and North Seas. In addition, a
press release from the EIB read, “The project
will contribute to a modal shift in which,
instead of by road, goods are transported
by sea, which is considered to be the most
sustainable transport mode for this type of
cargo. This will help to reduce the overall
climate impact of transport, and specifically
the promoter’s carbon footprint.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “The
creation of a thousand forests is in one
acorn.” It’s not that we have to necessarily
‘Sweden-ise’ the shipping business in order
to decarbonise it. That said, though, it’s
worth “spying” on others and investigat-
ing whether the remedies they’ve come up
with can help us deal with our sore point,
and maybe even further innovate by build-
ing upon the Swedish experience in green-
ing seaborne transportation and how ships
and port interface with each other. After
all, Elon Musk didn’t invent the automo-
tive industry, neither the electric engine
and drivetrain; yet, because of Tesla, car
manufacturing – and first and foremost
the driver’s experience – have changed irre-
versibly. The same can happen to shipping.
Some call it: the future. ‚
Photo: Green City Ferries Photo: Stena Line
Photo: Green City Ferries