The Environmental Performance of Inland Shipping. Development and Application of a Framework to Compute Emissions in

Inland shipping is widely regarded as a sustainable, environmental friendly way of transport. Looking at emission factors of transport, inland shipping’s scale advantage seems to create an advantage over other modes of transport. However, inland shipping requires multiple transshipments that consume energy which in turn can be related to emissions. These emissions are usually not included when comparing different types of transport. However, this thesis argues that including these emissions makes for a fairer comparison. Therefore, the research question of this thesis is formulated as follows: Therefore, to reach a satisfying answer, the emissions of transshipment should be included. To do this, a framework has been adapted from a model that already has been used in the Port of Rotterdam terminals. This framework computes the energy consumed by equipment in the terminal. Using emission factors, the energy consumption can be transformed into estimated emissions. These emissions are then added to known emission factors of transport. Together these emissions form the emissions in the total transport chain, which are compared to other transport chains; in this thesis the trucking transport chain. The modeling of the processes in inland terminals has needed adaptation from the original model. Not surprisingly, since both the equipment and the way the equipment is used differs from the terminals in Rotterdam. After adjustments, the computed energy consumption more closely resembled (<10% regarding kWh and <13% regarding diesel) the energy consumption as specified by the inland terminals involved in this research. The terminals involved in this thesis are the terminals located in Nijmegen, Den Bosch and Veghel. These terminals represent the extremes of the terminal population in The Netherlands regarding size and age. The extremes of the population were used so that they arguably encompass most of the inland terminal aspects used in this thesis in order to generalize results. How can the sustainability (environmental performance) of the inland shipping transport chain be measured and thereby create a fairer environmental overview of the different transport modalities? 6 When the emissions caused by transshipment and by transport have been added together, the outcomes have been projected on multiple example routes; Rotterdam – Duisburg, Rotterdam – Antwerp and Rotterdam – Den Bosch. Although it is impossible to compare the environmental friendliness of inland shipping to trucking in general, due to the dependency of the environmental performance on a wide array of factors and the subsequent assumptions made in this thesis, the example routes show interesting results. These can be seen on the next page. It becomes clear that every inland vessel type emits 1.4 to 3.5 times as less CO2 on every route. The scale advantage of inland shipping more than offsets the disadvantage of multiple transshipments. The same holds for NOx on a smaller scale; while the smaller ship types emit slightly more NOx, the larger inland vessels emit up to 2.2 times less than the trucking alternative. Another example of the scale advantage of inland shipping is presented by the emission of PM10 on the selected routes; the two smallest inland ship types emit almost 2 times as much PM10 than the trucking alternative, while the two larger vessels emit slightly less (up to 1.2 times). Unexpectedly, when looking at the transport emission factors, inland shipping can not compete with the trucking alternative in regard to the emission of SOx. Every ship type on every distance will emit more than trucking on the selected routes. The contribution of emissions caused by transshipment in comparison to the total amount of emissions in the transport chain ranges considerably from 6% to 54%. It is impossible to draw any conclusions from this, since the contribution is relative to the distance of transport; it decreases as the transport distance increases. Additionally, the relative amount of emissions caused by transshipment increases as vessel size increases. This seems illogical at first, but can be simply explained; while the emissions caused by transshipment remains constant (per container), the transport emissions decrease. The result will be a relative increase of emissions caused by transshipment