There is now a tool that will allow ports to attract cleaner ships into their facilities - without a lot of effort either by the ship or the port administration.
The Environmental Ship Index is a web-based portal that simply asks ports to lay out their incentives for ships with lower air emissions, while asking ship owners for the classification certificates and fuel receipts for the vessels they wish to register.
The formulae embedded into the site rates ships on a scale of 1 to 100, with the idea that the ships with lower emissions - ahead of the IMO standards - will gain financial incentives. It has been put together under the auspices of the World Ports Climate Initiative through the hard work of half a dozen ports including Hamburg, Bremen, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Le Havre.
It also required a lot of talking to organisations around the world, “This included dialogue with customers in the supply chain, the major ship owners as well as ports” explained Tiedo Vellinga of the Port of Rotterdam.
The beauty of the system is that it has been kept simple. "We have based it on the information that the ships owner or manager will have already: the certificate will last for six months and at the end of this the ship will reapply." explains Fer van de Laar who is to act as administrator of the new site. Further, because of its simplicity, the formula will evolve along with changes in the IMO regulations, so a gentle rise in standards will result rather than something set in stone. This favours ship owners who should be looking at putting in a newer generation of engines ahead of the IMO standards.
Ports can make their own mind up about what kind of benefit that they want to give to the cleaner ships, and even before starting, there are differences in scale and approach. However, some of the family of European ports that have been involved in its development look like aiming for around a 4% to 5% incentive above a base of around 20 ESI points.
The interesting thing for the ports' side of the equation is that other organisations in the supply chain can also flag up their own clean-air initiatives through the site. Therefore the likes of HPH and PSA may also put their names on initiatives, and further it is possible that the big companies such as Walmart, Ikea and Tesco might be persuaded to come on board.
Although at present it is a northern European initiative, Mr van de Laar hopes that very soon the ESI will catch on, hopefully even before the website goes live in January 2011.
Mr van de Laar makes the point, too, that early on in the development of the program in Amsterdam they coined a phrase that "a clean port is a port that makes money". He added, the philosophical question is the one that has to come first, and that is "do you want to do something for the environment?" He adds, the second question "how do you do it?" has been made easier by the ESI tool.
Mind you, the question of how all this will be financed was answered by Tiedo Vellinga who said that Rotterdam has room in this pilot year to find the finances to back up the plans, and that in the medium term, the attraction of 'green business' to the port will create enough revenue to cover the expenses.
