Yearly Reduc­tions of CO2-Emis­sions by CAESES

FRIEND­SHIP SYSTEMS AG strives to reduce energy con­sump­tion and emis­sions by sup­port­ing its cus­tomers in improv­ing their products, most notably ships as well as tur­bo­ma­chin­ery and engine com­po­nents. There­fore, we have taken a look at the question how much CO2-emis­sions are saved from sim­u­la­tion-driven design with CAESES® every year. Read here what we have found. 

Top-Down Approach

90% of trans­port is made at sea. Com­modi­ties and goods are shipped in the very sense of the word. To do so, there cur­rently are a bit more than 50 000 merchant vessels in service. (In 2017 the fleet com­prised around 17 000 ships for general cargo, around 11 000 bulk carriers, more than 7 000 crude oil tankers, a bit more than 5 000 con­tainer ships and almost 4 500 RoPAX ferry and pas­sen­ger ships accord­ing to statista.) Other larger ships such as search and rescue vessels, dredgers and salvage ships, offshore supply vessels, wind farm instal­la­tion and support vessels, fishing vessels, tugs, pilot and work boats, naval ships and yachts also sum up to about 50 000 entities. There­fore, about 100 000 ships are in service today world­wide. The CO2-emis­sions from shipping amount to 3% to 4% of global CO2-emis­sions which sum up to a total of 32 Billion tons of man-made CO2 every year. There­fore, around 1 Billion tons of CO2 can be attrib­uted to ships. These numbers differ a bit, depend­ing on the source. Many of the world’s biggest ship­yards, most notably Hyundai, Samsung, DSME as the largest three yards, utilize CAESES® for the sim­u­la­tion-driven design of their ships. And so do many of the well-known model basins, con­sul­tants and ship design offices. Many of our users report that they improve their hull forms with regard to resis­tance and propul­sion by around 5%. Some­times the savings are higher and some­times they are a bit lower, say 3%, when setting out from a good starting point.

Since CAESES® was first released in 2007 and since FRIEND­SHIP SYSTEMS started to promote sim­u­la­tion-driven design of ship hull forms in the early 2000s more than 40 000 ships have come into service, par­tially replac­ing older vessels. A tangible number of these ships have under­gone opti­miza­tion for lower energy con­sump­tion directly by using CAESES® or indi­rectly by uti­liz­ing sim­u­la­tion-driven design as researched and promoted by FRIEND­SHIP SYSTEMS AG. We estimate that around 10 000 ships need about 4% less energy by now than they would have needed in the past, with an addi­tional 1 000 ships every year. In 2019 this is approx­i­mately 10% of the fleet.

Nat­u­rally, ships are not always at sea and they are not con­tin­u­ally ben­e­fit­ing fully from the energy savings achieved at the design stage. We there­fore assumed an average of 220 days at sea per year and a uti­liza­tion rate of 75% of the possible savings when sailing. Bringing all this together we estimate the CO2-reduc­tions to amount to 2 835 288 tons in 2019. Keeping the many assump­tions and rougher numbers in mind, we felt that we should intro­duce a very con­ser­v­a­tive safety factor of 2 into the analysis. Rounding off to a smooth number we then get an annual reduc­tion of 1 400 000 tons of CO2, i.e., much more than 1 000 000.

“Our CAESES® users manage to reduce CO2-emis­sions by much more than 1 000 000 tons annually. This is why we do what we do and this makes me extremely proud of our team and company.” – Dr. Stefan Harries, CEO and co-founder of FRIEND­SHIP SYSTEMS AG

How does this relate to emis­sions from other sources? A standard semi-detached family home in Germany would burn about 1.5 tons of oil for heating per year, emitting some 3.9 tons of CO2. That means that the above savings equal the private emis­sions of around 350 000 houses, an equiv­a­lent to pro­vid­ing cozy homes for the pop­u­la­tion of a large German city such as Munich. 

Bottom-Up Approach

Let us take a look at a rep­re­sen­ta­tive ship for esti­mat­ing CO2-emis­sions in a bottom-up approach. A con­tainer ship with a capacity of 4 100 con­tain­ers (TEU) would have an engine of 37 000 kW and would typ­i­cally be at sea for about 6000 hours per year. Fuel con­sump­tion is approx­i­mately 0.166 kg/​kWh. Assuming a uti­liza­tion rate of 75% and an improve­ment of 4%, approx­i­mately 1 100 tons of fuel are saved annually. These savings cor­re­spond to just about 3 000 tons of CO2-emis­sions annually for one single ship. As a second example let us analyze a slower steaming Aframax tanker with an engine of 13 500 kW. With similar assump­tions as for the con­tainer ship, the yearly savings then amount to about 400 tons of fuel and a bit more than 1 000 tons of CO2. Con­se­quently, the lower estimate of 1 400 000 tons of CO2-emis­sions derived from the top-down approach for 10 000 ships seems very con­ser­v­a­tive indeed. Apart from the eco­log­i­cal impact, there nat­u­rally is an eco­nom­i­cal com­po­nent, too. Increas­ing energy effi­ciency readily reduces oper­a­tional costs in shipping. World bunker prices for IFO 380 are around 430 Euros per ton (February 2019). The annual costs are there­fore reduced by 473 000 Euros for the con­tainer ship and by 172 000 Euros for the Aframax tanker. Since most ships are in oper­a­tion for 20 years this is adding up to a pretty large sum.

Summary

We believe it may not be so impor­tant which of the numbers, those derived from the top-down or the bottom-up approach, are more accurate or more reliable. The impor­tant message is that each ton of CO2 that is not emitted helps to reduce mankind’s envi­ron­men­tal foot­print. And we are more than happy to be part of the effort of making our world greener.