CarbonTracking

HSC, or High-speed catamaran's, are the nec plus ultra of the ferry world. Lighter and faster, these things are the business for relatively short trips like the English Channel or crossing the Irish Sea. As usual, they are lumped in with standard ferry travel in the carbon footprinting world, with that green halo that the ferry companies are happy to others to bestow on them.

I've just found a few figures for a typical HSC, the Jonathan Swift from Irish Ferries, that may shake that halo.

From the Irish Ferries website we learn that "The Jonathan Swift is 86.6 metres in length , 24 metres in width and its gross tonnage is 5,989 tonnes. One round trip for the Jonathan Swift uses 15 tonnes of marine diesel oil."

A good start, there's a fuel consumption figure, 15 tonnes of marine diesel oil, linked to a specific route. The Dublin Holyhead route is 111km long and the Swift can carry 800 passengers max.

Down to the numbers:

• The fuel density of fuel oil tells us that one tonne of marine diesel oil is roughly 1111 liters
• One liter of marine diesel has roughly the same emissions intensity as regular diesel, i.e. ~2.7kgCO2e/liter, so one tonne of marine diesel emits ~2.7 tCO2e.
• At 7.5 tonnes per single crossing, as per Irish Ferries, total emissions for one crossing is 22.5 tCO2e
• Now to get a figure that allows us to compare with road/air travel, we need the emissions per passenger-kilometer, i.e. the amount of emissions created to move each passenger by one km.
• The distance is 111km. And the max. number of passengers is 800. Now the ferries aren't always full, so we'll take a passenger load factor of 80%, which is the same as used for air-travel, an average of 640 passengers per trip.
• Dividing our 22.5 tCO2e by 111 and then by 640 we get a emissions figure of 316 gCO2e per passenger-km

Hmm, some halo maintenance required, perhaps. This figure, per passenger kilometer, is almost 3 times that used by the UK government ( see Table 6k of Pg 21 of this UK Gov document

Its also more than twice the per-passenger-km figure given in the same document for air-travel (see Table 6l in the same document) , now there's one we didn't see coming. Air-travel greener than ferry travel, well I never !

DISCLAIMER : It is not my life's vocation to bash the ferry industry, but they just don't seem to bother giving us any figures themselves so we have to work away on our own, don't we ?

i was reading the EPA's National Inventory Report for Greenhouse Gas Emissions the other day. Some may say that I should get out more but these reports are real pageturners.

Anyway, rather that talk about the report, I'm just going to mention one particular chart that I saw which piqued my interest. On pg 39, we have Figure 2.4 Vehicle Numbers and Population 1990-2008.


What we have is the red bar chart showing the increase in car ownership and then the line showing the increase in population over the same period. So far, so simple.

Now at a first reading, the eye sees the level of vehicle ownership increasing at roughly the same rate as the increase in population. Good on you, Ireland, nothing to be reprimanded there.

The tricky bit though is that the population line uses a different scale, the scale on the right, the one that starts at 3 million and goes up to 4.5 million. Now you can argue that different scale is needed to make some sense of the chart, but the scale chosen is curious in that it makes the two trends, vehicles and population seem pretty much equal.

Now if we really wanted to compare trends then we should use a comparable scale, for example the % increase over a given time, i.e. if vehicle ownership goes up by 10% in the same time as population ownership goes up by 10% then we can safely say that nothing strange is going on.

So lets make a chart doing just that



Now that chart seems to tell a whole different story. Between 1990 and 2008, population increased by roughly 25% while vehicle ownership increased by a relatively whopping 140%.
So, caveat emptor, you've just got to watch out for what someone is trying to tell you in a nice chart.

Remember, the numbers never lie, once you have access to the real numbers. Its the use of the numbers that brings the spin.

A couple of days ago, I heard another respectable politician discuss the matter of global population growth and its impact on CO2 emissions, climate change and global warming. Its become quite common now the line "What is the point talking about emissions reductions while the population is predicted to grow to 9 billion by 2040 ?".

The subtext to this is always that the growth is going to to happen where all those filthy people live, you know, the poor, the underdeveloped nations. So it would appear acceptable to ask why we, the good and clear skinned, of the western world should bother to make any attempt at becoming lesser emitters when the unwashed hordes will undo all our fine work.

Well, y'all know I just love stats, so here's a few.

The population of the US is roughly 308 million and is expected to grow to 420 million by 2050. Whats another 112 million, you ask ?

Well, how about when you add to that figure the fact that the average American is responsible for the emissions of 19.7 tons of CO2 annually. Thats pretty high on the ranking of per-capita emitters, not the no.1 slot but not far off.

We can assume that the 112 new Americans that appear over the next 40 years will be fine upstanding average Americans. So they'll quickly get into the 19.7 tons CO2/year league.

Now, lets look at the 30 smallest emitters (Somalia,Burundi, Afghanistan, Dem. Rep. of the Congo, Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Niger, Ethiopia, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, Mozambique, Comoros, Nepal, Eritrea, United Rep. of Tanzania, Madagascar, Guinea, Timor-Leste, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Togo, Haiti, Cameroon, Gambia, Myanmar, Zambia, Liberia, Lao People's Dem. Rep.) These peoples have an average annual CO2 emissions of 0.10 tons, yep, thats 0.5% of the average American.

So, if you do the maths, the extra emissions of the 112 million Americans would be equivalent of increasing the populations of those 30 countries by.......

wait for it.....

22 billion.

Yessir, 22 billion, now thats alot of people, so mnay in fact that they're never going to get born between now and 2050.

So the point I'm making is that instead of worrying about the population increase in the parts of the world who produce damn all emissions, lets worry about the 800 pound gorilla that is US population growth combined with US high emissions levels. I can see the slogan now, "Save the Planet : Sterilize an American".

How's then for apples ??

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, created a commision some time ago to study the form that a carbon tax might take in France. That commission, led by former prime-minister Michel Rocard, presented its recommendations to the French government on July 27th.

The heart of the matter is the introduction of a tax on all fossil fuels and electricity, which in France is 80% nuclear.

The recommended price is €32 per tonne of CO2 in 2010 rising to €100 per tonne in 2030. This breaks down to an increase of 6~7c per litre of petrol/diesel ans a 10% increase in the price of gas.

The government will face great difficulty in the implementation such as tax as it is wide open to claims of taxing the poor more heavily than the well-off. To counter this, the government is considering the concept of a "green cheque" where families will receive an annual cheque accoridng to their revenues. Obviously the idea is that they can use this cheque to invest in less energy-intensive products, insulating their homes, buying more efficient cars etc.

Interestingly, the commission also recommended that the tax be applied also to electricity even though 80% of France's electricity is from nuclear power which is considered a low-emissions source of power. Rocard indicated that he believes that the tax should serve to increase overall energy efficiency, not merely the use of fossil fuels.

Going back to a previous post the impact on flying would be minimal, with the price of a Dublin-Paris return flight increasing by just over €4.

Aircraft fuel,kerosene, is exempt from tax. This is kind of odd as we see the advent of carbon taxes and also when petrol/diesel for personal use is heavily taxed (€0.40/litre for diesel).

So how much of a difference would it make if the government were to tax aircraft fuel at a similar level ?

Lets take a typical mid-range airplane like B737 or an A321 uses roughly 4 litres of kerosene per 100 passenger-km. If aircraft fuel was taxed at the same rate the passenger would end up paying €16 extra for every 1000km flown.

Not too bad so far, a return trip from Dublin to Paris would cost around €24 extra. But there's a few more things to bring into play. The first is a dark subject called radiative forcing index (RFI) which is a measure of the difference, in global warming terms, of emitting CO2 at high altitudes compared to terrestrial emissions. The IPCC currently estimates an RFI of 2.7. This means that a litre of kerosene burnt at high altitudes ( above 3000m ) does 2.7 times more damage in global warming terms than a litre burnt on the ground. See here and here for more details on that topic.

So the stuff that airplanes emit is worse stuff, 2.7 times worse. Seems fair then to increase taxes accordingly, so our €24 tax increase now gets bumped up to €65. Hmm, getting saucy now isn't it.

But there's more. You see flying is about the most energy intensive activity there is known to man. Our return flight to Paris, for the weekend you know, will have used 60 litres of fuel in about 2.5 hours of actual flying or about 24 litres per hour. A Hummer ( remember those ) would use about 14 litres per hour driving around at 100 kmph. The government taxes the hell out of tHummers and the like at a tidy €2000/year of motor-tax.

So why should the same logic not apply to aircraft travel ? Why not stick on an extra 50% tax to bring it in line with other government measures to dis-incentivise. The weekender in France is now €100 more expensive but alot more equitable in environmental terms. For the sake of discussion, that shopping trip to New York would now be costing €600 more in taxes, hope those jeans were REALLY good value.

Bring on Copenhagen !

We've had the first generation of carbon-offsetting. You pay someone to plant trees, or you pay someone to generate green-electricity, maybe you pay someone to become a vegetarian. Its all a bit intangible sometimes, the time-period in which the offset occurs is sometimes unclear and the offset may be occurring on the other side of the world.

How about if your offsets had an impact in your home area ? How about if your offsets guaranteed an effect within a defined timespan, for example 10 years ? How about if your offsets paid to build the kind of society that you think we should all live in ? This is what carbon-offsetting 2.0 is all about. Its about helping your neighbours, friends, family to implement changes that reduce energy usage, changes that you may already have made in your own life. The thinking is that we should get everyone doing the easy stuff first, the stuff with the high-impact/low-cost.

I'll present a few suggestions below with all calculations are based on the following stats:

• the average Irish house, 150 square meters, uses 4000 kWh/year in electricity
• the same house uses 20,000 kWh/year in heating, the equivalent of 1800 liters of heating oil
• the average driver drives 15,000 km a year, the average European car emits 160 grams CO2/km

Here's a few of the prime candidates with some quick calculations of the cost of each ton of CO2 removed.

• Buy them an electricity monitor,something like Current Cost. Anecdotal evidence indicates an average drop of 10% in electricity usage. Cost : €60. Benefits :a drop in usage of 400 kWh/year saving €76/year in electricity bills and 250 kg CO2/year
• Buy them a digital-programmable thermostat. Ensuring that heat is delivered right when you want it, and just the right amount. Heating systems with proper thermostat control can burn 10-15% less fuel. Cost : €60/€70. Benefits : 2000~3000 kWh less heat energy used. For an oil-heated house, this means roughly 250 liters less per year, saving of €150/year at current prices and 650 kg CO2/year
• Switch their electricity supplier : Its beautiful in its simplicity. In Ireland the major supplier has a carbon-footprint of 0.624kg of CO2 per unit of electricity. The green candidate, Airtricity, has a footprint of 0.050kg of CO2. Switching supplier would have the direct effect of saving 2.2 tons CO2 for the average house. Airtricity is a shade less than 2c dearer per unit so this would cost you €80 extra per year, a price of €36/tCO2 saved, not far from the market price.
• Buy them CFL's : If you replace a 100W bulb by a 15W CFL bulb, and if that bulb is used on average 2 hours a day, then over the course of the year you'll save €11 in electricity bills per bulb and 62 kg CO2 per year and per bulb
• Pay for extra insulation : The ultimate in un-sexy presents, imagine showing up at your girlfriend house with a roll of rockwool insulation under your arm. But, when you tell her that 30% of her heating bill is going out the roof if she has standard insulation from 15 years ago and that 4 inches extra of rock-wool will put a stop to it, things may get really hot. At a cost of €10/meter squared, a three bed semi can get insulated for €900. Benefits : 6000 kWh less heat energy used. For an oil-heated house, this means roughly 600 liters less per year, savings of €360/year at current prices and 1.56 tonnes CO2/year

There it is, local is the new global. Of course, maybe not everyone knows someone with a dodgy oil boiler and bad insulation. Maybe there's a space in the market for the concept of a "Regional Offset Company" where all money paid by local people/businesses goes to actions such as the above in the locality.

Carpooling is one of those universal green-loves.

I mean, people share a trip in a car, less emissions all around, a bit of social-networking going on, its an all round winner of an idea.

Since its such a good idea, there is a bunch of good people who have created carpooling websites out there on the web. You can happily spend a few days signing up to the tons of good-hearted sites out there who propose to get you in touch with the one other person on the planet who wants to go from Ennis to Tralee next Tuesday at 7 p.m.

The most common problem is that the one other person who'd like to share that trip with you is probably on a member of one of the OTHER carpooling sites. Well, in that case, you may as well be on a different planet. This is the big flaw. Each carsharing website is a walled garden. Only people registered on the same web-site will have the privilege of sharing a trip. Sounds a bit 90's doesn't it ? What could we do ?????

I guess one way ( I'm a pinko-leftie-european ) is to have the EU, or individual states run the whole thing as a public service, with one operator per country/region and so destroy the walled gardens but at some cost to the creativity that goes with free enterprise. What to do, what to do ?

The other option is blindingly simple. I mean, this is the age of the web, nay Web 2.0. Why don't these sites talk to each other ? Why don't they open their databases to that a driver on site A can propose to share a trip with someone on site B ? You see whats killing all current initiatives is the lack of critical mass. Carpooling systems work best when there's enough people on board offering to share trips. But when the people who'd like to share trips are spread between so many web-sites, none of the web-sites gain the traction and they all plod along, if even.

If the sites talked to each other, the way bittorrent sites do, or hell, e-mail providers do, then you can be sure that if you don't get a match for a particular trip, its only because no-one else wants to go there right now

And who wins ? Well, Joe Public for one, the odds of him sharing that trip have improved. The carpooling sites as well. They no longer OWN their members but whoever signs on with them is guaranteed to get the best matches for trips. This will draw more people into carpooling and the different sites can then fight it out on the extra services they can offer their members, like text alerts, snazzy web interfaces, better karma.

As an aside, if all carpool trips are aggregated this opens the possibility of Verifiable Emissions Reductions, i.e. carbon-credits, which could then be sold to provide revenue for the service providers or the trippers.

Now that that's fixed, anyone for that trip to Tralee next Tuesday ??

Irish carpooling sites

• http://www.swiftcommute.ie
• http://www.avego.com
• http://www.travelsmart.ie/
• http://www.tripmi.ie/

There I was on the Oscar Wilde a few weeks back. Its the very nice Irish Ferries boat that links Rosslare,Ireland to Roscoff, France. With two young kids this is the comfortable way of driving from France to Ireland, forget that landbridge stuff and the extra 800km ( for me at least ).

So I got talking to one of the ship's engineers and asked him a few questions about passenger numbers, fuel consumption etc. and it was all pretty edifying. John said ( well I'll call him John, don't want him getting in trouble ) that the ferry uses on average 70 tonnes of intermediate-fuel-oil ( IFO 180 or IFO 380 ) on a crossing which is about 550km each way.He also said that the traffic split was predominantly passenger/car traffic from May to October and freight for the rest of the year. Having previously sailed with Irish Ferries in December and February I can confirm that it is indeed trucker heaven at those times of year.

I asked him about the impact of weather and the loading factor of the ship and Pat said ( I'll call him Pat now ) that it didn't make a huge difference. In really bad weather and crazy tides with a full load the fuel usage could go as high as 90 tonnes per trip and on beautiful days with a tailwind and an empty hold that could drop to 60 tonnes per trip.

Its not that surprising that the load factor of the ship doesn't have a huge affect on the fuel consumption when you consider that the maximum cargo load of the ship is 5250 metric tons of deadweight (DWT). If the ferry is chockablock with a full car load of 580 cars, each weighing around 1.2 tonnes ( average figure including passengers luggage etc ) this has the ferry using only around 700 tonnes, 13% of its capacity.

Anyway thats not really what I wanted to say. We now have real world consumption for a car ferry, 70 tonnes of fuel to carry 580 cars over 550km.

The 70 tonnes of oil equates to emissions of 204 tonnes CO2e. Divvying this up between the 580 cars give us 350 kg CO2e per car per one-way trip.

To put this in perspective, if Aer Arann was to do the same trip in one of their efficient ATR-72's with a full load on a comparable journey, e.g. Waterford, Ireland to Rennes, France, the emissions per person would be 56 kgCO2e per one-way trip. See atmosfair for the flight calculations. ( note, they assume 80% occupancy but I've changed used 100% in the 56kg figure to compare with a full car-ferry. )

In the example above, ferry travel, even with 5 passengers in car, comes out worse than flying in emissions terms. What it does highlight is that it's nigh impossible to take an off the shelf figure for ferry travel. Each ferry company has its own emissions profile and only when they start providing hard facts to their passengers that the comparison with air-travel can become meaningful. The figures I've shown might give a hint at whats stopping them from doing so.

P.S. The figures I've derived above differ somewhat from previous calculations. See a previous blog entry and report for more details.

P.P.S. Thanks to Seamus for the details ( not his real name either, I hope I haven't narrowed it down too much by now )

The holy grail.

Sometimes you need to be someplace quick, maybe its to see about a girl, maybe its to be at an 60th birthday party when you know you have to be 1550km away by the following afternoon. The offset scene won't be enough to fix that guilty conscience,I mean staying fat while paying someone else to lose weight sits uneasily, doesn't it.

So how can we square this circle ? Well lets start with the question, why do airplanes fly ? After all, the problem is really the flying airplanes, they're the ones burning all that tax-free kerosene way up in the atmosphere.

The current carbon accounting approach, is to say that airplanes fly because people travel. So if an airline flys a total of, lets say, one million airmiles with 1000 passengers then each passenger is responsible for the kerosene burnt over 1000 airmiles.

Lets ask the qustion again, why do airplanes fly ? Don't airplane fly because airlines want to make money from the tickets sold to passengers ? So does it stand to reason that the responsibility then follows the money ?

To illustrate this lets take the case of a 100-seater airplane flying the Toulouse-Shannon route. Normally you'll have 20% percent of the passengers paying through the nose, 60% paying the "regular" price and 20% paying very little, special offers, propmotions etc. Now the question is, which of these passengers needs to stop flying in order to have the airline cancel that flight, thus avoiding al those emissions ? Well whatever way you do the maths, the 20% paying very little are not going to count for much in the decision.

Is this the achilles heel of the no-fly campaign ? If I fly, while giving little or no money to the airline, am I not somewhat absolved of the carbon guilt ? If I fly for free, as can happen on low-cost airlines, am I carbon-neutral ? If I fly for free, and use the money that I would have paid for alternative transport for insulating my grand-mothers house (additionality clause), am I then carbon-positive ?

Answers on a postcard please..

NOTE: The author needs to go to Ireland in a few weeks.

• Flying would cost €10 and produce 400kg of CO2e.
• Train and ferry would cost €360 and produce 130kg of CO2e.
• Train half way and plane the rest would cost €140 and produces 220kg CO2e

Thats a real-world offset priced at €1296/tCO2e for the train-ferry option and , somewhat, ahem, above the current market price.

Emissions figures are becoming pretty commonplace in our climate-change sensitive world. Every car ad will tell the the amount of grams of CO2 each kilometre produced by their latest beauty, albeit in really small text tucked down the bottom. The airline industry is getting up to speed as well, Air France, Lufthansa, BA, to mention but a few, all let you calculate the emissions generated by your flight. So far,so good, the public conscience is being served.

There's someone missing though. The ferry companies serving Irish routes are all mum on the topic. Now, Ireland is an island, at least the last time I checked, and there's quite a bit of ferry traffic going on with our neighbours. Figures from Irish ferries show that 845,000 cars and 3.27 million passengers made the trip in 2007.

Now since the ferry companies won't give the emissions info we'll have to go and look for it ourselves. Happily, Irish Ferries provide quite a few facts and figures on their 2007 activities, and with a bit of picking and choosing we can start our calculations.

Its a four step process:

• From the total fuel consumption of the fleet we can calculate the associated emissions: 206,393 tonnes CO2e
• From the revenue split we can decide how much of these emissions are due to transporting cars : 82,557 tonnes CO2e
• Breaking this down we get the emissions per car-km.: 1.13 kg CO2e
• With the car-km figure we can get the emissions related to a specific route, : e.g. Dublin-Holyhead 113kg CO2e one way

The maths for the above figures can be seen in this report. All sources are referenced so if anyone can find a mistake in the figures feel free to leave a comment.

While the figures seem quite high, one has to remember that we're talking about transporting cars here, the average car weighs in at just over a tonne, and also that passenger ferries are damn big, the Ulysses ship in the Irish Ferries fleet weighs over 50,000 tonnes.

A number of ferry companies were contacted during the writing of the report in an effort to base the report on the most accurate figures available. Without exception, the replies indicated that the ferry companies think that their emissions are their business and theirs alone.

The report does not pretend to provide definitive figures for ferry transport but rather presents a methodology and a first attempt. Only the ferry companies themselves can provide fully accurate figures.

Let's hope they think the travelling public deserves that.