With a test of a poison paradise (don’t they know that it’s toxic?)
The Business Times
SEA's leading financial paper. Follow thrive. (by The Business Times) on IG: @thrive_bt Subscribe to BT: btsub.sg/btp99
This is a reduced version of The Business Times’ ESG Insights newsletter. Sign up here to get the complete version in your inbox every week.
??This week: A report released this week by the Global Centre for Maritime Decarbonisation (GCMD) seems to suggest that it might be feasible to conduct pilot tests for ammonia bunkering in Singapore.
The report determined that the risks of conducting the pilots – ammonia is a highly toxic fuel – were “low or mitigable”. It also identified locations in Singapore where the pilot testing can take place.
The feasibility of ammonia bunkering is critical to the maritime industry’s decarbonisation strategy. International shipping, which contributed about 2 per cent of all human-related carbon emissions in 2018. The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has set an initial target to cut emissions intensity by 40 per cent from 2008 levels by 2030, and by 70 per cent by 2050. Absolute emissions for international shipping has a 50 per cent by 2050 reduction goal.
The industry has coalesced behind ammonia as an important green fuel candidate. The fuel ticks a number of important boxes:
Unfortunately, ammonia is like a star player on a sports team whose talents are game-changing, but who has a toxic personality that could wreck the team if not properly managed. Except that ammonia is literally toxic. Ammonia can be a problem because it:
The technology is so nascent that there aren’t even commercially available vessels at the moment that can use ammonia. Pilot tests at this stage will therefore have to use proxies at various parts of the bunkering process.
领英推荐
It is not yet clear if Singapore will want to do bunkering testing at this time within its borders, given the significant safety concerns.
An October 2022 report by the Maritime Energy & Sustainable Development Centre of Excellence (MESD) – which like GCMD also receives support from the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore – raised substantial questions about the safety of ammonia bunkering.
That earlier study further concluded that existing mitigation technologies to address leaks “have not found ways to meet the requirement of future ammonia bunkering operations”.
Nevertheless, “further studies with physical validation are indispensable, as this is the decisive way to provide quantitative and qualitative proof of the mentioned mitigation measures.”
If Singapore deems it too risky to go straight to bunkering pilot tests at this time, the testing of safety measures could be a potential alternative that would still be valuable to the ammonia debate.
?? Top ESG reads:
What do you think about today’s newsletter? Let us know at [email protected]. Sign up for the full version here.