Abstract
Environmental organisations require the shipping sector to act promptly on new practices to cut down greenhouse emissions. Over the last few years, a lot of discussions have taken place about the ‘slow-steaming’ philosophy, the practice of operating cargo ships at significantly less than their maximum speed, and thus optimising a vessel’s speed to match the arrival time to a berth slot opening at the port. Slow steaming has been considered as sustainable means of reducing CO2 emissions. However, there are concerns that although slow steaming could lower emissions in the short term, it could actually lead to increased CO2 emissions in the long term. The purpose of this chapter is to shed some light on the debate and provide a holistic overview of the slow steaming concept. The chapter examines all the current trends relating to speed limits, speed optimisation and speed reduction. In the meantime, the challenges of slow steaming are addressed, giving special emphasis on the port and market stakeholders.
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Notes
- 1.
Study on Regulating speed: a short-term measure to reduce Maritime GHG emissions, by Jasper Faber et al., CE Delft, of 18 October 2017.
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Pastra, A., Zachariadis, P., Alifragkis, A. (2021). The Role of Slow Steaming in Shipping and Methods of CO2 Reduction. In: Carpenter, A., Johansson, T.M., Skinner, J.A. (eds) Sustainability in the Maritime Domain. Strategies for Sustainability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69325-1_17
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