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Emissions from container ships, car carriers and bulk carriers leaving the Red Sea are set to rise by up to 70% as ship operators increase speed to compensate for the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope.
Major container ship operators, including Denmark’s AP Møller-Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, are among the companies that have increased vessel speeds in a bid to minimize additional sailing time for ships that would normally use the Canal of Suez.
The increase in emissions is the result of ship hijackings due to attacks by Yemen’s Houthis on commercial vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Most shipping companies have chosen the longer route since November, which at normal speed adds between 10 days and two weeks to a container ship’s journey from Asia to Europe.
The speed increases follow nearly a decade of “slow steaming” by most shipping companies in an effort to save on fuel consumption and minimize carbon emissions.
Maersk, operator of the world’s second-largest container ship fleet, said it had “suspended” steam sailing on some services to make up for “some of the delay” resulting from the circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope.
Hapag-Lloyd, the fifth-largest container line, said speeds have generally increased and that it is speeding up ships when necessary to overcome congestion delays.
Maritime analysts at Sea Intelligence said shipping company customers were “caught between a rock and a hard place” by operators’ decisions to increase vessel speeds.
“If they want to move their goods, they will have to accept a significant increase in their carbon emissions,” the company wrote in a statement.
Simon Heaney, senior manager of container research at London-based Drewry Shipping Consultants, said that in recent years container ships have been operating at 14 knots, the equivalent of about 16 miles per hour on land. He anticipated that most shipping companies would follow a “hybrid” approach, increasing speed only to 15 or 16 knots.
Sea Intelligence estimates that for a modern large container ship a 1% increase in speed typically produces a 2.2% increase in fuel consumption. An increase from 14 to 16 knots would increase consumption per mile by 31%. Considering the longer distance, emissions for a round trip would increase by just over 70%.
Lasse Kristoffersen, chief executive of Wallenius Wilhelmsen, operator of the largest fleet of car-carrying ships, said his company’s ships had also accelerated. Auto transport operators – which transport completed vehicles mainly from Japan, Korea and China to Europe and the United States – were struggling to cope with a sharp increase in demand even before the diversions. Few new ships are scheduled for delivery this year.
Kristoffersen stressed that ship speeds are “nowhere near” speeds that could offset the additional transit time, adding that European emissions trading regulations are a limiting factor on speeds. Shipping companies operating in and out of EU ports have been included in the emissions trading scheme – which forces emitters to buy permits for excess emissions – since the start of this year.
The speed increases extend to companies that transport bulk commodities such as coal, iron ore and grain, whose ships have been sailing at average speeds of up to 10 or 11 knots in recent years.
Jan Rindbo, head of Norden, a Danish operator of several hundred dry bulk vessels, said that with daily charter rates for dry bulk vessels about 50% higher than a year ago, the company’s ships are traveling “a little faster” than before the recent outage.
Hans-Christian Olesen, CEO of Denmark’s Ultrabulk, which operates 155 bulk carriers, expects greater pressure for higher speeds in the future. However, he expressed concern about the potential impact of higher speeds, noting: “This comes at a huge environmental cost.”