Co2 Reduction in Container Shipping

The public’s growing environmental awareness is pushing the container shipping sector to decrease its significant carbon footprint. This thesis presents an overview of current available measures to do this and tests those measures on several case studies. The main goal is to find out what type of measures are the best, operational measures like slow steaming or technological ones like hull design. The selected measures are tested on five different case studies, commonly used routes of different length have been selected. The measures are assessed on effectiveness and efficiency, so both Co2 emissions and costs play a big role in this research. The results are a clear indication that operational measures are outperforming the technological ones. Further, recommendations have been offered on the question what measure is best used under what conditions. It turned out that operational measures are effective in almost all of the case studies while technological measures are mostly only effective on the longest routes. Slow steaming was by far the best measure, reducing both Co2 and costs in all scenarios. The usage of fuel cells however is not yet useful. This measure proved to be subject to high costs and was even increasing emissions on the shortest routes.