The Port of Rotterdam is making steps towards a more sustainable future, with far more of its processes expected to be running on electricity or hydrogen by 2050, according to Eric van der Schans and Nico van Dooren, director of environmental management, and energy and process industry respectively.
“I think we will still recognise many elements of today’s port in the port of 2050,” adds Mr Dooren. “You’ll still see a lot of large containerships, and there will still be all sorts of chemical plants with their characteristic pipes and conduits.
“The difference is they’ll be running on organic feedstocks and they won’t be emitting vapour plume, since we won’t be letting the residual heat go to waste anymore.”
Rotterdam is currently home to large number of petrochemical plants which run on oil products. Fossil feedstocks of this kind are becoming less important, while the chemical sector is turning more towards vegetable products.
The port is looking to close its production and consumption loop so that it can stop wasting raw materials, says Mr Schans. “I am talking about the recycling, re-use, etc. And in cases where we are still required to use fossil fuels, we need to ensure that the resulting CO2 emissions are captured and re-used or sequestered.”
The Port Authority is pursuing an ‘and-and’ strategy, installing wind turbines in the port area and make existing industry and power stations in the port area as clean and efficient as possible.
“In the present system, emitting CO2 is simply too cheap, so that it isn’t interesting for parties to invest in these kinds of technologies,” adds Mr Schans. “Make CO2 emissions a lot more expensive and the technology to do something useful with them will develop more or less automatically.
“We need to introduce new revenue models that reward a sustainable approach. Take a water company that supplies process water to industry. If this company weren’t paid for every litre of water supplied, but for providing a ‘cooling’ service, for example, this would stimulate the company to provide this service using as little water as possible.
“You need to try to build in incentives of this kind wherever you can. And as Port Authority, we also try to serve as intermediaries in this process.”
