Strategic engineering and environmental consultancy Ricardo led the ‘Air quality challenges and strategies for ports’ webinar, which looked at the key drivers requiring action on emissions and air quality in and around ports; how ports can develop an evidence base on emissions, what are the likely key sources of emissions and the implications for developing an air quality strategy.<\/p>\n
Leading the webinar, Dr Guy Hitchcock, technical director, energy & environment at Ricardo, said that when looking at developing a strategy, it could be helpful to consider regulatory issues such as the requirement to implement green technology and financial factors including incentives for different areas of a port and increasing the scope and scale of green tariffs. Research is also important and could include an emissions dispersion model, feasibility of LNG and related infrastructure and monitoring the benefits of alternative propulsion. Finally, investment options such as trialling shore power and low emissions technology should be considered.<\/p>\n
Workable plan<\/strong><\/p>\n Establishing a clear, flexible and feasible plan through thorough research and planning is key to a port developing the best strategy for itself, stressed the webinar guidance, while it should also meet the expectations of the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs\u2019 (DEFRA), which in January published the ‘Clear Air Strategy 2019’, detailing that ports will be required to publish Air Quality Strategies by the end of the year.<\/p>\n The strategies will need to set out plans to reduce emissions from ports and associated waterways, including emissions from shore activities and visiting ships. The government will publish guidelines to advise ports on how to develop effective and targeted Air Quality Strategies by spring.<\/p>\n Port of London<\/strong><\/p>\n Tanya Ferry, environment manager at the Port of London Authority (PLA), discussed the work the PLA has undertaken to reduce emissions, including research into the cost and feasibility of shoreside electricity and vessel versus lorry exhaust emissions. She said that the PLA, which published its Air Quality Strategy in June 2018, considered two terminals for shore power. The PLA determined that considerable vessel emissions savings could be made, but weren\u2019t able to guarantee power availability where required and discovered there was a plug design issue.<\/p>\n A port-wide inventory was undertaken in 2016 to update the method being used to calculate emissions, with the PLA\u2019s final report published in January. Solutions such as changing engines and retrofitting were assessed, alongside behaviour including speed, plus infrastructure, fuel, security and safety.<\/p>\n It is now looking further at shore power, an alternative fleet and low emission technology, as well as monitoring at exhaust trials for its inland fleet in particular.<\/p>\n Southampton model <\/strong><\/p>\n Tim Scarborough, associate director – energy and environment at Ricardo talked about developing a port emission inventory and associated tools and techniques, using the Port of Southampton as a case study.<\/p>\n Working with Southampton City Council last year, Ricardo carried out air quality modelling for the appraisal of options to reduce NO2 concentrations in the city, including a clean air zone.<\/p>\n Mr Scarborough said that the steps taken to assess the port included looking at the port emission inventory baseline 2016, port emission inventory projection for 2020, dispersion modelling for 2020 and estimating the impact of additional policies.<\/p>\n He noted that the driver for the work was compliance with the annual mean NO2 concentrations limit set by the Air Quality Directive, as opposed to the focus on emissions under the Clean Air Strategy, which is under the remit of the National Emissions Ceiling Directive.<\/p>\n Port air quality strategies need to be evidenced based and an evidence base can first draw on emissions inventories, which can be compiled using data and assumptions from the port estate. Ports can also make projections of how this may change, while understanding the sources of pollution and targeting and assessing the impact of improvement measures.<\/p>\n An evidence base can also include concentration measurements by designing, installing, operating, managing and quality-assuring air quality measurements; understanding trends and relating these to port actions; and supporting occupational and public exposure studies.<\/p>\n Dispersion models can play an important role in creating an evidence base. Detailed dispersion modelling can be used to assess current and future air quality and the impact of improvement strategies. It can also include odour and dust assessment and source apportionment.<\/p>\n The key steps in developing the evidence base baseline to underpin a strategy include understanding the driver e.g. a focus on emissions; selecting pollutants to tackle; selecting emissions sources to tackle, including major emissions sources near the port; selecting the geographical and operational extent of the inventory; choosing an inventory temporal period and frequency; and identifying data sources.<\/p>\n Using a projection of future emissions, the impacts of mitigation measures can be estimated. The projection of future emissions is estimated from a baseline year – as seen in the Southampton model, which represents current activity levels. For use in strategies, the baseline year is most likely to be the year of the latest available data for each emission source.<\/p>\n In the government’s Clean Air Strategy, the years of most interest are 2020, 2025 and 2030. These will be used as markers for ports emissions reduction progress, however, the Southampton case study focused on 2020 only.<\/p>\n Emissions measuring methods<\/strong><\/p>\n To estimate emissions for non-road machinery, rail and onsite power generation, ports can obtain fuel consumption records from port operators, check equipment operating hours and fuel consumption variable factors. Inventory guidance is available such as the European Environment Agency (EEA) air pollutant emission inventory guidebook (when published). The IMO also published guidance on publishing port emissions inventories in 2018. Ports should also aim for real world testing.<\/p>\n Knowing how much traffic is accessing a port could be useful for inclusion in an Port Air Quality Strategy as it can be a significant contributor to air quality around a port and on major routes to a port, and will help account for a port’s impact on wider air pollution concentrations, but is difficult to set boundaries around what emissions should be attributed to the port. Measurement methods could include traffic counts, automatic number plate recognition and booking systems at dock gates, plus local\/regional traffic models that can separate out traffic destined for the port.<\/p>\n Mitigation<\/strong><\/p>\n Looking at mitigation, it is necessary to recognise that vessels are likely to produce the most emissions in a port but can be the source most difficult to make changes to, as well as acknowledging the challenges in making changes and the cost of implementation, according to Mr Hitchcock..<\/p>\n To address shipping emissions, ports are facilitating cleaner\/newer vessels, as well as considering alternative fuels and shore power infrastructure. To cut rail emissions, stop\/start functionality, longer trains and shifting road to rail could be implemented. In addition to this, Ricardo points to reviewing port machinery emissions, which ports are increasingly doing through investing in zero emissions electric or hybrid machinery to use alongside or replace diesel machinery.<\/p>\n Finding a way to reduce traffic queues and congestion, switching to electric vehicles, encouraging faster uptake of Euro 6\/VI and sustainable travel solutions can also be useful for reducing road vehicle emissions. For stationary infrastructure, switching electricity to onsite renewable is an option.<\/p>\n Using shore power as mitigation option would require technical considerations including any network capacity\/reinforcement issues, what power source to use and whether this could be renewable, what flexibility shore power allows and which vessels have the potential to plug in and how to incentivise ships to plug in.<\/p>\n Ports have shown caution in shore power investment because of its cost. Ricardo pointed out that to undertake a cost benefit analysis ports could seek several capital cost quotes, but a comparison of capital costs with energy savings is only likely to show costs outweigh benefits. Accounting for GHG and air pollutant (monetised) savings, Mr Hitchcock pointed out the costs and benefits may be more balanced and within the margin for uncertainty, e.g. the choice of appraisal period. Reduction of noise could also be a benefit. Ports need to be mindful if sensitive receptors are downwind of dock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A recent webinar has offered advice and solutions for UK ports developing Air Quality Strategies ahead of the UK governments December deadline for ports to produce individual strategies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":401,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe-greenport"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":402,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions\/402"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}