Shipping’s new clean technologies and the old buying habits holding them back

Shipping has a habit it can’t seem to shake off: the tendency to buy an energy efficiency technology (EET) based on headline savings results. These figures are based on performance achieved on another vessel under controlled conditions that are unlikely to reflect the buyer’s own operating profile, vessel characteristics or real-world conditions.

For air lubrication systems (ALS) performance figures are often taken from sea trials held in light or ballast conditions, where compressors face less hydrostatic pressure to work against, so the system typically performs at its best. The data being used to sell these systems are not wrong, but they don’t tell a ship owner the full story.

Research from the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping regarding the ship owners and charterers’ experience using compressor-driven ALS in commercial operation shows net savings spanning a range from zero to six percent, varying with draught, hull form, speed and sea state. The problem is not with the technology itself but that these numbers differ quite significantly from the data being marketed to the industry.

That selective use of performance data has contributed to a credibility gap in the EET market. As a result, some shipowners are delaying investment decisions until a stronger body of independently validated evidence becomes available.

That is a worrying outcome for decarbonisation, and a disappointing outcome for the suppliers who have invested in real engineering and a bespoke, vessel-specific measurement and evaluation approach. These suppliers are being asked to compete in a market that is only reading headline figures.

The data ship owners should be asking for is what a supplier predicts their system will deliver on their vessel, at their draughts, across the speeds and routes they actually operate. Framing clean technology investment around that question, before capital is committed, is the most direct lever ship owners have to raise the standard of transparency and accountability across the market.

The reason why this matters now more than it did five years ago is because the way ships are being operated has changed. Tightening carbon intensity regulations and rising bunker costs have pushed vessels into more varied speed profiles, with ships now spending considerable time below the design speeds at which headline performance figures are typically recorded.

A technology engineered to perform within a narrow speed band is fundamentally different from one that delivers consistent performance across the full range of speeds at which a vessel actually operates.

Many compressor-based, cavity-style systems currently on the market are designed to operate efficiently within a relatively a narrow operating window. Outside this level, these systems are not able to deliver net savings.

A vessel with fast legs and slower ballast returns, or or one that regularly operates at lower speeds, spends a significant proportion of its operational time in conditions where first-generation ALS offers little or no commercial benefit.

Building a system with a broader productive operating window is, however, only part of the solution. Producing credible performance evidence for a specific vessel is fundamentally a prediction challenge: how will a system behave on a hull it has not yet been fitted to, at the integration the owner is proposing, under the operating profile that ship is actually run at?

That question can no longer be answered by pointing to what the system has done on other vessels, or by turning to those with a large installed base. High order volumes concentrated on a single vessel type do not necessarily validate a technology across the wider fleet. They simply generate more data from a limited operating profile.

Answering that question properly requires testing and modelling programmes built deliberately around the variables that manage performance: full-scale cavitation tunnel testing on individual pods, model-scale towing tank work across multiple hull forms, full-scale pilot installations and multi-phase CFD analysis, corroborated independently by industry leading partners.

That level of thoroughness is the foundation on which Armada’s performance methodology is built, and is what allows us to stand behind our predictions. In a market where headline claims have often run ahead of what can be demonstrated on an individual vessel, a supplier willing to back its projections with contractual guarantees and meaningful commercial accountability sends the clearest possible signal that its modelling can be trusted.

The future of clean technologies will be shaped not by the boldest claims, but by the strongest evidence. Ship owners have more influence over the standards this market operates to than the current procurement environment suggests. Holding EET providers to vessel-specific evidence, and declining to commit CAPEX without it, is the clearest way to exercise that influence.

This article was written by Alex Routledge, CEO, Armada Technologies