Global climate goals, stricter emission regulations, and noticeable cost pressure are leading to ever greater incentives to reduce ship emissions and increase the energy efficiency of shipping. In particular, the EU reporting regulation on CO2 emissions from, to, and within the European Union, which has been in force since 01.01.2018, has led to an increase in the energy efficiency of shipping. The specification of CO2 emissions is mandatory. However, there are currently no sufficiently suitable methods to validate reported emissions, since the ships are operating worldwide and the routes are recalculated due to adverse weather conditions, projections such as those for road traffic cannot be implemented.

The aim is to develop a methodology for the quantitative determination of CO2 emissions from shipping. With the help of data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS), movement information is set in relation to ship size, speed, and meteorological and oceanographic environmental conditions. More than 500,000,000 daily AIS data records from hundreds of own and thousands of cooperative AIS base stations as well as detailed ship data including information on the main propulsion plant are available to JCS and form the data basis for the project. Data on fuel consumption and emissions are not publicly available and represent the gap to be closed.

Milestones

Position Data preparation and quality improvements

Data collection, analysis, and provision are central aspects of the project and are implemented by JCS. It is essential to check the availability and usability of the data and to provide them through high-performance interfaces. AIS data, environmental data and ship data have to be made available to the project partners by building up a suitable database. An infrastructure will be designed that allows the partners to test the developed algorithms. The approximately 300 billion motion records from 2018 to 2019 as well as the weather data will be made available. From the 500 million daily records, 3.6 million hourly messages are expected to be generated for an expected 150,000 vessels. Since signal collisions can occur in densely trafficked areas and individual messages may not be received correctly, this work package will first compare the AIS data quality of different sources and then improve the data quality. The investigations will be carried out in particular by DLR.

Reference Vessel Generation

For each requiring AIS equipment vessel, the calculation of the emitted carbon dioxide should be functional. JCS has very detailed information for practically all ships. Especially for newbuildings, however, not all required data may be available yet. Therefore, more than 450 ship models have been generated which serve as a basis for calculation in case of missing detailed data. This was developed by the CML.

The resistance model

For reliable emission estimation, the development of a complex and innovative model to represent the resistance of the ship’s hull is necessary. This package includes the development of a hull drag model based on AIS, weather, environmental and static ship data. This work package was mainly developed by the CML.

The emission model

For the final emission calculation, it is necessary to determine the required engine power on the basis of the ship’s drag. A software model was developed by HSW in which the required amount of fuel was calculated based on the required engine power including all auxiliary equipment. From this, with the addition of the most probable fuel type, the emission is calculated.
For the calculation, the actual equipment is used for more than 60,000 ships. If the investigated ship is not included in these 60,000, more than 450 cross-sectional ships were generated, which are used as ship model fallback for the calculation.

Validation and real-time capability

The main objective of this project is to create a tool for emission projection and estimation. Through the associated partners, consumption data has been provided for a large number of different types of vessels, in different trade lanes, seasons and conditions. These were used to calibrate the resistance, engine and emission model. After intensive testing, it was demonstrated that the results were sufficiently accurate to be comparable to reality in almost any operating condition. The scalability of the IT infrastructure could also be demonstrated.

Prototype

User surveys were used to work out what their expectations are for the validation of emissions. This is reflected in the frontend. The JAKOTA Design Group is responsible for this work package. It is now possible for the user to select any ship and have the Co2 emissions calculated. These can then be compared with the MRV data. This makes it possible for ship owners to verify their data (check for human errors) before sending it. Maritime authorities now also get the ability to investigate reported emission data for anomalies. This Work