Carbon Tracking : Passenger Ferries
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.
April 15th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Co2 in production and refitting of ferry discounted over life of ferry.
Support services, sales staff, general office, cleaning, maintanance, port and port services staff getting to worke etc etc etc
April 16th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Hi Paul, I’ve updated the report to clarify that I’m only doing “Scope 1″ emissions as per the GHG Protocol (links in the report ). You’re right that a full ( Scope 3 ) assessment would need to take in all the things you mention and more.
Thanks for the feedback / Colm
September 9th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
[…] 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 […]
September 28th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
This is really helpful. Have you done more work into it since?
I am trying to weigh up the benefits of travelling home from Brussels by train-ferry at Christmas. You state that Dublin-Holyhead would be around 113 kg per car. I guess this figure would be less for foot passengers but by what quotient?
The only calculator for ferries that I can find gives a figure about half your figure for a 70 mile journey http://www.firstimpressionslastlonger.com/emission_calculator.html
The calculator I have used for flying (www.atmosfair.de) gives 230 kg equivalent for the climate impact of Brussels-Dublin. The UK sites however (like climate care) only give 100 kg CO2.
Long story longer, given it takes at least 12 hours to get from Brussels to Dublin by train, I don’t want to go to the effort if the last leg (by ferry) would undo all the previous effort.
Any ideas welcome!
September 28th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
My “More thinking on ferry travel” entry of Sept 9th takes a more concrete example of a Roscoff-Rosslare crossing. The figures come out somewhat different but thats not surprising given the amount of assumptions made in the report mentioned in this entry.
The hardest question to answer for ferry travel is “How to divide up the emissions responsibility ?”. Should one do it on a per weight basis ? i.e. a foot passenger + baggage roughly 100kg therefore only responsible for one 12th of the emissions of a typical passgenger car with two occupants, roughly 1.2 tonnes
Or should it be on a money basis ? i.e. who gives the financial incentive to the ferry company to keep their service running. If a foot passenger pays 20% of the cost of a passenger car with one passenger then he is only responsible for that proportion of emissions compared ot the passenger car. Quite impossible to be definite about it without figures from the ferry companies. What I’m convinced of is that the ferries are not as planet-friendly as they’ll allow us to believe.
If you do choose the ferry option for Christmas, you could think about avoiding the high-speed cat. They are even more voracious than the big fat ferries, I’m still looking for clear figures on that and will post them once I find something solid.
November 27th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
This is the point where you go somewhere that angels fear to tread…. No author should ever go online looking for love or understanding but as the compiler of the First Impressions emissions calculator here I am to explain the difference for greeneye between my figures and the work done for this blog.
OK so at the moment there is no agreed way across the industry to measure passenger emissions on ferrys. However we did want to take a shot at measuring what needed to be measured rather than just what was easily measured. Even if it was out by some way the debate has to start somewhere. Anyway our starting point was to compile data from fuel usage in ferrys over a period of year. This covered short trip up to 50 nautical miles and longer journeys. It also covered car ferries (eg the Caledonian McBain island hopers) and larger passenger classes but not cats which were seen as being too different. We got the data from all over the world from whoever would give it to us. Having taken advice from Greenpeace, the David Suzuki Foundationin Canada, Envirowise and the We only used complete data sets for three full years and then we aggregated them by passengers taken over that period of time.
So we do not make assumptions of full or empty boats, we cannot disaggregate between passangers with cars or more luggage (at the moment - but lets hope); Nor weather nor boat type, nor the full lifecycle analysis of the boat, nor time of year all of which cause great variation. It is simply an average of lots of people on lots of boats in lots of places around the world and any roundings that were done were to be up rather than down.
Now if this sounds pretty unscientific stuff that depends on what you are looking for:
1. this is generic information to give you a nominal idea of how things relate to one another - whats the difference between trains (and all the variations you get in train transportation), ferries and Planes (again given all the variations in aircraft).
2. It considers no economic factors - apart from anything else economics and market places are not rational they rely on social psychology and patterns of behaviours that equate a pair of armani jeans with feeding an african family for a year.
3. This is work in progress it reflects the best understanding we have to date. Not the final answer but as best we know right now. I worked off and on on this particular data set for nearly a year (the second longest we have had to do - the longest was three years on paper emissions) and I would be the first to admit that we need more detail - indeed what we really need is for companys to publish their own detailed emmissions for each route and boat for the public to understand and this is something that we campaign for constantly.
4. It is research undertaken amidst great constraints. We the researchers are but three people trying to understand a great many issues that have been overlooked by large commercial and government calculators. Our only source of funding is through our business of selling office supplies and recycled or organic lifestyle products which we plough entirely into the research and campaigning work. Which makes me wonder why we ever left academia in the first place - till I remember how many reports that I wrote for the Government that were just buried!
Anyway - and back to the point. The information given on this blog and the calculation above is a great starting point and in this case may well (for that read almost certainly) be a better indication of the emissions for Irish routes. Where I would become slighty uneasy is the idea Colm OG’s revenue split proposal. I think Colm was less wrong (in this game nobody can be right) with a weight distribution analysis rather than a cost distribution. After all I pay the same for my transport tickets as my wife - but thanks to my mother in laws fine Indian Cuisine I am twice the size…
November 27th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
and BTW
thank you for the excellent work on this!
June 27th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Nice website . will come back again soon
August 31st, 2009 at 12:05 am
How long have you been blogging…your good at it.
September 16th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Yes interesting look at the world.