Moving Shipping to Cleaner Technology 

Shipping industry holds own summit at COP 23 climate meeting, pushes for ‘Maritime Energy Transition’ 

To promote green shipping MAN Diesel & Turbo and the International Windship Association (IWSA) invited 200 leaders of the maritime industry to the ‘Ambition 1.5°C: Global Shipping’s Action Plan’ to debate an agenda to reduce shipping emissions. 

MAN Diesel & Turbo wants to expand the debate on how to reach COP 21’s targets and engage with all stakeholders – whether the general public, NGOs, shipowners or classification societies – to see what solutions are already in place or required. 

The hopes and demands of the shipping industry for a strengthened mandate of the IMO were not fulfilled in Paris; Bonn offers us a new opportunity to accelerate what MAN Diesel & Turbo calls the ‘Maritime Energy Transition’, the move to cleaner technology within our industry. Ultimately, uniform environmental standards must be established at international level – a strong IMO as an international regulator is therefore essential.

Martime Energy Transition 

The term ‘Maritime Energy Transition’ stems from the German expression ‘Energiewende’ and encapsulates MAN Diesel & Turbo’s call to action to reduce emissions and establish natural gas as the fuel of choice in global shipping. It promotes a global ‘turn to gas’, driven by the IMO, and a common approach by the shipping industry and politics to invest in infrastructure development and retrofits.

Launched in 2016 after COP 21, the initiative has since found broad support within the shipping industry and German politics.

The Maritime Energy Transition is also an umbrella covering all MAN Diesel & Turbo activities in regard to supporting a climate-neutral shipping industry, including:

• The retrofitting of the ‘Wes Amelie’ feeder containership’s MAN 51/60DF engine to dual-fuel gas operation – the first such conversion of its type in the world
• Based on the success of the Wes Amelie project, the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure recently published a public state-aid programme for new LNG-vessels and retrofits for Euro 30m a year until 2021
• The development of MAN Diesel & Turbo’s two-stroke ME-GI/ME-LGI engine portfolio to enable dual-fuel operation on, primarily, natural gas but also on alternative gaseous and liquid fuels such as LNG, methane, ethane, methanol and ethanol
• The development of synthetic fuels created with renewable energy (i.e., power to gas), another technology with great CO2-reduction potential. Here, MAN Diesel & Turbo is closely collaborating with the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy to create a research programme.

World’s First Conversion of Container Ship to Dual-Fuel Operation