DECARBONISATION, DIGITALISATION AND OPTIMISATION CROWD IN

If some (but not all) of the forecasters are to be believed, economic conditions may lead to a drop-off in cargo flows. However, cargo planners are now thinking about “just in case” rather than “just in time,” a response to more and more frequent disruptions which might lead to more cargo flowing. Still, shipping goes on; all parts of the maritime markets are seeing discussions on decarbonisation and digitalisation.

On the emissions front, new rules taking effect at the beginning of 2023 will have dramatic impacts.

On the data side, vendors of ship management software are hoping to infuse “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence” into their wares.

Port planners need to keep scanning their horizons as these items will be impacting the movements of vessels.

Much of the discussions of new regulations on vessel emissions circle back to a simple fact- a tried and true method of reducing CO2, along with Nox and Sox, is to slow vessels down. But this is part of the bigger solution. These days, “optimisation”- a popular subset of vessel software that combines routing with fuel saving, will enable ships to score higher in various rating schemes- which are now looked at closely by cargo owners. Some prescient (perhaps…we will only know a few years out!) analysts have suggested that freight bookings will be driven by the established metric- the price per box (or per tonne), but also by a new component, which is the carbon pricing element.

In this new and highly complicated world, the landside transport providers, and also the ports, will play a pivotal role. One much talked about aspect of the new paradigms for ship operations (and fuel saving) is that vessel arrival times would be more closely matched to availability of berths (and, in a well-tuned data eco-system, with landside storage and intermodal interfaces). In the wake of recent work by the Federal Maritime Commission, and other agencies looking into supply chain disruptions of the past two years, there will be a greater focus on harmonising data in order to smooth out cargo flows.

All of this will get more muddled, before it gets sorted. Port planners, and their web/data folks, will need to be watching closely; hopefully digitalsation, decarbonisation and optimisation can all flow smoothly.