Speaking at a UK House of Lords Committee Hearing, James Kershaw, Scientific Officer with the climate action NGO Opportunity Green, said that while greenhouse gas emissions reductions and overall public health benefits could be achieved by the transition to ammonia as a marine fuel, robust measures must be introduced to control N2O and NH3 emissions.
While acknowledging that the use of ammonia as a marine fuel could help to reduce GHG emissions, Kershaw said that ‘nitrogen management must be integrated into wider policy discussions’, and ‘efforts to address the climate crisis must also address ecological, socio-economic and public health issues’.
The ongoing inquiry by the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee has been reviewing UK government policy on nitrogen across a wide range of industry sectors. Kershaw participated in a hearing held last Wednesday (19 March) at which Andrew Hoare, Head of Marine Systems and Green Shipping at Fortescue, and Trevor Brown, Executive Director at the Ammonia Energy Association, also gave evidence.
Speaking to Bunkerspot yesterday (27 March), Kershaw said that use of ammonia as a marine fuel is still very much at the development stage and so there is as yet only a limited amount of empirical data on ships’ N2O emissions. And the data that we do have so far – much of which has been taken from computer modelling and small scale testing – has shown a ‘massive spread’ on N2O emissions.
Therefore, Kershaw continued, it is important to ensure that as ammonia-fuelled vessels do hit the water, their owners should be incentivised to reduce their emissions as much as possible. In order to this, he argued, international maritime regulations and emissions trading systems should set default N2O emissions factors at a ‘conservative’ (i.e. high) setting. This would mean that ship owners would see a significant benefit in over-compliance: aiming for emissions that are below the default setting and using continuous monitoring to verify this superior performance.
Click here to access the landing page of the House of Lords nitrogen inquiry, here to view the live recording of the 19 March hearing and here to access the transcript of the session.
