Emissions from container vessels in the port of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Emissions from ships have negative effects on both humans and the environment, particularly in port areas. This paper develops a bottom-up activity-based model to compute emissions from container vessels within the boundaries of the port of Singapore. The input data is nearly 2 million Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals recording ship calls and various ship specifications. The paper analyses the container vessel segment by compiling a comprehensive emission profile by vessel size, port call time and carriers. This generates new insights in the dynamics and sources of ship emissions. The results show that the majority of emissions were produced by ship calls of shorter than 2 days, and 46% of the total emissions were produced by container feeder vessels as a result of Singapore port being a major international transhipment hub and the more frequent visits from such vessels. Our study also indicates stable distribution of emissions over the year, suggesting seasonality does not play a major role in container shipping operations.

KEYWORDS:

• Emission accounting
• bottom-up model
• ais data
• ship emissions
• port of singapore
• container vessel

Acknowledgments

Authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments in the review process.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Singapore Maritime Institute and the Research Council of Norway under the Maritime Research between Norway and Singapore (MNS) R&D Programme, project ‘Real Energy Efficiency and Emissions in the Seaway’ SMI-2015-MA-16 in Singapore and 255672/O80 in Norway. This article is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled Emissions from container vessels in the port of Singapore presented at the 41st Annual Conference of International Association of Energy Economics, Groningen, The Netherlands, 10-13 June 2018.