State of play in technology and legal framework of alternative marine fuels and renewable energy systems: a bibliometric analysis

ABSTRACT

Various endeavors are undertaken by the maritime industry, academia, and policy-makers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These include the search for feasible technologies that could be used onboard merchant vessels and are propelled by international legal and social initiatives. To this end, this study aimed to critically analyze the research trends pertaining to the active methods of reducing the negative environmental impact of shipping. The research is focused on alternative fuels and renewable energy systems with respect to the related policy-making and existing legal framework. Therefore, a bibliometric approach was applied to a sample of 234 scientific papers indexed in the SCI-EXPANDED in Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Core Collection. The results indicate that the scientific efforts were made more on alternative fuels, while renewable energy sources only recently became a popular research subject. Moreover, the environmental benefits of prospective technologies are more investigated than their financial aspects. The research effort on alternative maritime fuels was made in parallel with the legal one, both aiming to combat global climate change and magnifying each other.

KEYWORDS:

• Green shipping
• alternative marine fuels
• renewable energy
• policy implications
• bibliometrics
• GHG emission

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that helped improve the initial version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT statement

PK - Methodology; Validation; Formal analysis; Investigation; Data curation; Writing - original draft; Writing - Review & Editing

MG - Conceptualization; Methodology; Formal analysis; Investigation; Data curation; Writing - original draft; Visualization; Writing - Review & Editing

KW - Writing - original draft; Supervision; Writing - Review & Editing

YSH - Conceptualization; Methodology; Software; Formal analysis; Data curation; Writing - review & editing; Supervision

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Gdynia Maritime University internal grant no. WN/PI/2021/03.