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Abstract
The comparative superiority of shipping services with respect to atmospheric emissions per ton-km is beyond debate in the case of deep sea and bulk operations. The case for short sea shipping in a setting with small consignments and frequent port-calls needs to be demonstrated relative to road transport alternatives, in particular when cargo markets are fluctuating. The empirical part of this article is based on detailed shipment-level data from a current European short sea operation and data from engine reports on actual fuel consumption. The dataset enables the construction of a high-quality origin–destination matrix of pallet-based shipments. A contrafactual case of an alternative trucking operation serving this comprehensive set of shipments is constructed, and CO2 equivalent emissions to air are calculated and analysed under different scenarios. This comparative analysis illustrates just how efficient a modern short sea shipping operation needs to be in order to compete with road transport with respect to air emissions. The analysis suggests that such a pallet-based short sea shipping operation may be superior to trucking alternatives when it comes to carbon emissions under given circumstances, but not always.
Acknowledgements
A preliminary version of this article, comprising data from a single round trip only was presented at ECONSHIP 2011 at Chios, Greece. A further developed version was presented at IAME 2013 in Marseille, France. I would like to offer my sincere thanks to the reviewers of this paper for very helpful comments, which I have tried to respond to as best I can.