AFRICA

Alarm bells sound on future of oil industry --Funding sources fast drying up

Date: Dec - 14 - 2021 , 08:06

BY: Emmanuel Bruce

The decision by global financiers to move away from financing dirty hydrocarbons presents a challenge for oil and gas producing countries like Ghana, Manager for Gas Business at Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), Mr Hamis Ussif, has said.

He said all over the world, investors continued to move away from financing oil and gas production and every now and then there were reports on a group of financiers or one major financier signalling a stop to financing hydrocarbons.

Speaking at the 7th edition of the Ghana Gas Forum, he said “at the last count, we had about 1500 global managers with trillions of dollars, saying they will not fund dirty fuel.”

He said the investment commitment for renewables had shot up to US$298 billion, while that of fossil fuel hovered around US$130 billion.

“Renewable energy is now gaining momentum, but already, funding commitments is now much bigger than fossil fuels. Global spend on hydrocarbons based power generation continues to reduce, whereas commitments and funding to renewables continues to increase.

“Tesla, a company set up only in 2003 has become one the biggest companies and as at October 26, its market capitalisation reached US$$1 trillion dollars, while we have the likes of Ford, Toyota struggling due to the onslaught of Tesla,” he pointed out.

He explained that the simple reason was that people were eager to move from vehicles fuelled with hydrocarbons to electric vehicles.

Read; Defined regulations needed to attract investments — Gas Stakeholders

Transitioning into energy companies

Mr Ussif said it was therefore necessary for oil and gas companies around the world to start transitioning into energy companies, something, he said the GNPC was already considering.

“When a company is faced with competitive challenges, the usual prescription is focus on your core where you have the resources and competence to withstand the competition. Unfortunately in this case, the core itself is the problem.”

“For a typical upstream oil and gas company, if you are going to focus on your core, that will be on exploration and production of hydrocarbons and that is where the problem is. So the paradigm is shifting,” he explained.

He said oil and gas companies must therefore adopt the notion of an integrated energy company.

“What we have realised is that, as the transition continues to gain momentum, we are going to have more and more consolidations within the sector. We are not going to see companies stick to their oil business because it is a dying business.”

“We are going to have refocusing of energies on gas because it is a transition fuel and has a bit more time to run than oil. It is cleaner and more efficient and works better on power plants,” he stated.

Read; ‘Natural Gas must power Africa’s industrialisation agenda’

Pursuing opportunities

The Commercial Gas Manager therefore urged companies to pursue the agenda and the opportunities that were in natural gas.

For a national oil company like GNPC, he said one of its key mandates was to ensure energy security, by providing the energy security needs of the country.  

He said on the other hand, with the decarbonisation agenda, people expect GNPC to shun the hydrocarbon resources that would help it meet the energy needs of the country.

“And because of the de carbonisation agenda, you won’t get the usual sources of funding, which are mostly from the global capital market.

“So GNPC is trying to ensure that we maximise the resources that we have as quickly as we can, as we want to ultimately transition into an energy company. The segments of the business keeps shrinking: oil is going to be phased out, gas itself has some respite but over the long term, it would also be squeezed out,” he noted.

He concluded that any oil and gas company that wanted to survive had to look beyond its core business.

Opportunities still exist

The Managing Director of Tullow Ghana Ltd, Mr Wissam Al Monthirry, while also admitting that financing opportunities in the sector were shrinking, said that he was of the view that some financing opportunities still existed.

He said the oil and gas industry was at a substantial crisis point with relation to raising funds, mainly due to concerns about climate change, but also due to technical challenges in the industry and volatility of the commodity price.

He said Tullow was however confident and strongly believed that there was appetite to finance the growth of continents, particularly Africa through gas.

“We are firm believer as a large investor in Africa and in particular Ghana, that there will be appetite to support that growth in the country and continent,” he stated.

To buttress his point, he revealed that Tullow had been able to raise a US$1.8 billion dollars bond earlier this year, which was four times oversubscribed.

“This is not only a testament to investments in oil and gas but testament for Ghana because all of those investors know their primary investment target is Ghana.

“So we take some comfort and take that as a demonstration that there is still appetite, provided it’s done under the right context and gas is actually one of those transition fuels that creates a lot of excitement for investors,” he stated.

Commenting on how easy it would be to secure financing for exploration of just gas even in the absence of oil, he said that environment has not yet been created for such a focus.

“It is easier to raise money for oil and gas now but it won’t be easy to raise money just for gas production and this may be due to the commerciality of oil.

“The world needs gas but in general the world is over supplied with gas so investors are worried about the lack of commerciality of gas. If you produce a barrel of oil, it will be sold but gas is a little bit difficult,” he pointed out.

He said this was why agreements like the take or pay was sometimes necessary to give confidence to investors that gas could be commercialised.

“In spite of its known environment detriments, it is still easier to secure investments for oil than gas,” he noted

Humans Have Broken a Fundamental Law of the Ocean

Sea life seemed to follow a predictable pattern. Then industrial fishing came along.


MATT REYNOLDS


Damselfishes and Mediterranean bream fishes or Sarpa salpa, in the Roustaud reef near La Ciotat, southern France. August 18, 2019.Boris Horvat/AFP

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On November 19, 1969, the CSS Hudson slipped through the frigid waters of Halifax Harbour in Nova Scotia and out into the open ocean. The research vessel was embarking on what many of the marine scientists on board thought of as the last great, uncharted oceanic voyage: The first complete circumnavigation of the Americas. The ship was bound for Rio de Janeiro, where it would pick up more scientists before passing through Cape Horn—the southernmost point in the Americas—and then head north through the Pacific to traverse the ice-packed Northern Passage back to Halifax Harbour.

Along the way, the Hudson would make frequent stops so its scientists could collect samples and take measurements. One of those scientists, Ray Sheldon, had boarded the Hudson in Valparaíso, Chile. A marine ecologist at Canada’s Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Sheldon was fascinated by the microscopic plankton that seemed to be everywhere in the ocean: How far and wide did these tiny organisms spread? To find out, Sheldon and his colleagues hauled buckets of seawater up to the Hudson’s laboratory and used a plankton-counting machine to total up the size and number of creatures they found.

Life in the ocean, they discovered, followed a simple mathematical rule: The abundance of an organism is closely linked to its body size. To put it another way, the smaller the organism, the more of them you find in the ocean. Krill are a billion times smaller than tuna, for example, but they are also a billion times more abundant.The smaller the organism, the more of them you find in the ocean.
What was more surprising was how precisely this rule seemed to play out. When Sheldon and his colleagues organized their plankton samples by orders of magnitude, they found that each size bracket contained exactly the same mass of creatures. In a bucket of seawater, one third of the mass of plankton would be between 1 and 10 micrometers, another third would be between 10 and 100 micrometers, and the final third would be between 100 micrometers and 1 millimeter. Each time they would move up a size group, the number of individuals in that group dropped by a factor of 10. The total mass stayed the same, while the size of the populations changed.

Sheldon thought this rule might govern all life in the ocean, from the smallest bacterium to the largest whales. This hunch turned out to be true. The Sheldon spectrum, as it became known, has been observed in plankton, fish, and in freshwater ecosystems, too. (In fact, a Russian zoologist had observed the same pattern in soil three decades before Sheldon, but his discovery went mostly unnoticed). “It kind of suggests that no size is better than any other size,” says Eric Galbraith, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at McGill University in Montreal. “Everybody has the same size cells. And basically, for a cell, it doesn’t really matter what body size you’re in, you just kind of tend to do the same thing.”

But now humans seem to have broken this fundamental law of the ocean. In a November paper for the journal Science Advances, Galbraith and his colleagues show that the Sheldon spectrum no longer holds true for larger marine creatures. Thanks to industrial fishing, the total ocean biomass of larger fish and marine mammals is much lower than it should be if the Sheldon spectrum was still in effect. “There was this pattern that all life seems to have been following for reasons that we don’t understand,” says Galbraith. “We have changed that over the last 100 years or even less.”

To work out if the Sheldon spectrum still held true, Galbraith and his colleagues brought together data on plankton from satellite images and ocean samples, scientific models that predict the abundance of fish, and marine mammal population estimates from the International Union for Conservation of Nature. In total, the group estimated the global abundance of 12 major groups of marine organisms, from bacteria to mammals. They then compared the state of today’s oceans with an estimate of what they might have been like before 1850, by taking into account the fish and mammals that industrialized fishing and whaling have plucked out of the water. To simplify things, the researchers assumed that the levels of bacteria, plankton, and smaller fish in 1850 were similar to today’s levels.“The world that I grew up in is gone,” says Kristin Kaschner, a marine ecologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany.

When Galbraith and his colleagues looked at this pre-1850 estimate they could immediately see that the Sheldon spectrum largely held true. The researchers found that in the pre-1850 scenario, biomass was remarkably consistent across size brackets. When they totaled up all the organisms that weighed between 1 and 10 grams, it came to 1 billion metric tons. The same was true for all the organisms weighing between 10 and 100 grams, and between 100 grams and 1 kilogram, and so on. Only at the very extreme ends of the spectrum—the smallest bacteria and the biggest whales—did the measurements start to vary.

Comparing these pre-1850 estimates to the modern-day models told a very different story. The models suggest that the biomass of fish larger than 10 grams and all marine mammals has shrunk by more than 2 billion metric tons since 1800. The very largest size classes appear to have experienced a reduction in biomass of nearly 90 percent since 1800. Many of the big fish and mammals that used to populate the ocean simply aren’t there anymore.

“The world that I grew up in is gone,” says Kristin Kaschner, a marine ecologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Between 1890 and 2001, the population of all whale species declined from more than 2.5 million to under 880,000. While the population of some whale species has rebounded since the global whaling moratorium in 1986, many are still endangered. And while the majority of fish stocks are fished in a way that allows them to maintain or grow their populations, just over 34 percent of them are overexploited, which means we’re removing so many fish from a certain area that their populations cannot recover.

Some of the fish stocks being overexploited include Japanese anchovy, Alaska pollock, and South American pilchard. “I think we are moving towards a world where the default is not a natural ecosystem in which everything is as you had it before there was human exploitation and intervention,” says Kaschner.

Although the picture isn’t rosy at the moment, looking at the size spectrum of marine organisms could be a helpful indicator of ocean health, says Julia Blanchard, an ecologist at the University of Tasmania in Australia. Blanchard has studied coral reefs and found that when the Sheldon spectrum seems out of whack, it’s a sign that the reef ecosystem is no longer healthy. “If we’re looking at improving that, what we might do is ask what would be a level of fishing that would maintain the size spectrum,” she says.One problem is that fisheries often target “big, old, fat, fecund, female fish.”

One problem is that fisheries often target what scientists call BOFFFFs: big, old, fat, fecund, female fish. Their large bodies are prized by fishers, but BOFFFFs are a vital source of new baby fish. Take these away and the size spectrum quickly veers out of kilter. One way to manage this is to encourage the fishing industry to target medium-size fish, allowing mature ones to replenish depleted populations.

Of course, overfishing isn’t the only challenge that marine populations are facing. A worst-case scenario of 5 degrees Celsius of warming would be too hot for 50 percent of fish species, and even 1.5 degrees of warming would still be too much for 10 percent of fish, according to one study. Overfishing means these populations are starting from a much weaker point than they would otherwise be. Take too many fish out of the ocean and you reduce genetic diversity, weaken food webs, and allow ocean habitats to degrade, all of which makes an individual ecosystem more vulnerable to changes. “What’s important is that as you fish out a system and then it’s warmed, it’s much less resilient to that warming,” says Blanchard.

The good news is that fish species can bounce back. “They are extremely resilient,” says Ken Andersen, a marine ecologist at the Technical University of Denmark. In September, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature moved four tuna species further down its list of threatened species after their populations started to recover, thanks to stricter fishing quotas and crackdowns on illegal fishing. “It’s easier to stop overfishing than it is to stop climate change,” says Galbraith. “If we fish less, if we allow ecosystems to recover, we can maintain that.”

Meet the Cyberpunk Albatrosses Scanning for Secret Explosions

Recording infrasound on land isn’t particularly tricky; you can place sensors pretty much anywhere. Not so in the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere: Sensors can only be placed on mostly small, lonely islets, so the coverage is poor.

And, den Ouden says, out in the open ocean the “huge chaos of waves” makes a lot of undesired noise. Some of this irritating infrasound comes about as the sloshing sea surface waves interact. “The ocean starts to go up and down with a rhythm,” says den Ouden. The sea acts like a gigantic speaker, blasting energy into the atmosphere that travels upwards and across the water, toward the land, like an invisible tidal wave. Other oceanic infrasound is less problematic but more mysterious: The motion of the sea triggers atmospheric vibrations that radiate straight upward. But these waves have proven so difficult to detect that their existence has long been an open question.

This collection of infrasound waves, which are technically known as microbaroms, have been referred to as the “voice of the sea.” Most researchers want to drown it out. “We try to get rid of the microbarom signal, because we’re interested in explosions,” Iezzi says.

Ideally, infrasound detectors at sea would not only be able to fill in a vast coverage gap, but also document the microbaroms well enough that, with the help of filtering software, they could be effectively canceled out. But where would you put these detectors? Boats wouldn’t work. “The problem with them is that they’re moving up and down all the time,” says Lamb—and that would mess with the recording. Balloons have been used to record infrasound on land, but their flight paths over the sea would be too unpredictable to be of any use. (They would, however, be useful for recording lightning strikes, quakes, and volcanic eruptions on Venus, because the surface of Earth’s evil twin is so hot that any instruments placed on the ground there would quickly melt. Or, at the very least, overheat.)

The open ocean is “an extremely challenging place to record sound,” says Bowman, “so challenging, in fact, that if you’d asked me prior to looking at this paper, I’d have said it’s basically impossible.”

As it happens, Samantha Patrick, a seabird ecologist at the University of Liverpool, was curious about the ability of seabirds to navigate using infrasound. After conversing with den Ouden and his weather- and geophysics-focused colleagues, they developed an outré idea: Why not attach microbarom detectors to birds? And not just any birds: wandering albatrosses. Their wingspans, which can be 11 feet long, are lengthier than any human is tall. This allows them to spend considerable time simply floating on air currents above open waters, something that conserves energy as they embark on foraging trips. Not only do they fly across vast swaths of isolated ocean, but they don’t dive into the water, so any sensors attached to them wouldn’t get especially wet.

In short order, the researchers built minuscule infrasound sensors and fitted them into pouches—packages no more hefty than a TV remote. As fun as it may be to visualize these bags being lugged about the way a school kid carries a backpack, that would have been needlessly complicated. Instead, the pouches were simply stuck to the backs of the avian assistants with some duct tape.

Last year, the team headed to the Crozet Islands, little blips of land in the French sub-Antarctic on which wandering albatrosses like to nest. But how, pray tell, do you get albatrosses to cooperate? With a very special sort of hug, apparently—one that prevents any potentially injurious flapping and pecking. “They don’t really have predators—certainly no natural predators,” says Patrick, who assisted the team with their research. “So you literally just walk up to it, and then you put your hand on its bill, and then you have to hug it, because it’s so big. You give it a hug and lift it off the nest, and then one person holds it, and then the other person duct-tapes the logger to their back.”

File source

 

A Gene-Tweaked Jellyfish Offers a Glimpse at Other Minds

United News Team

 

We owe much of our understanding of how memory works in the brain to an unassuming sea slug called Aplysia californicus. It’s about a foot long, reddish brown, and has been favored by scientists since the 1960s because its neurons are big enough to jam an electrode into.

That wasn’t the only time researchers have plumbed the ocean depths looking for answers about our own neurology: Giant squid taught us the fundamentals of action potentials, the means by which signals propagate along nerve cells, The horseshoe crab helped to shed light on how our visual system works (despite the fact it has eight more eyes than we do). The octopus offers insights into the evolution of sleep.

“There’s this long, beautiful history of people going and finding marine invertebrates for whatever the questions were at the time,” says Brady Weissbourd, a postdoctoral scholar in biology and biological engineering at Caltech. Weissbourd is the lead author on a recent paper in Cell that brings another creature into the fold—a jellyfish that’s been genetically modified so that its neurons glow when they fire. It could give us new insight into the workings of minds quite unlike our own.

The jellyfish, specifically a species found in the Mediterranean called Clytia hemisphaerica, was the perfect candidate for scientific research. It’s about a centimeter wide when fully grown—small enough to fit on a microscope slide—and, like many jellyfish, it’s transparent. The researchers built on that potential by introducing a snippet of DNA called GCaMP, which creates a green fluorescent protein. GCaMP has been widely used in research on mice, zebrafish, and flies, but it actually originally comes from a jellyfish that’s closely related to Clytia, so Weissbourd’s team also had to knock out the genes for four other green fluorescent proteins that naturally occurred inside them.

To insert the glowing genes, they took advantage of Clytia’s unique life cycle. Its reproductive system is triggered by light. “Exactly two hours after the lights go on, the jellyfish release eggs and sperm into the water,” Weissbourd says. The researchers switched on the lights, collected the eggs, and injected them with the snippet of code for the green fluorescent trait that they wanted to insert, along with a protein that helped to splice it into the jellyfish’s DNA.

The fertilized eggs develop into larvae, which swim around looking for a hard surface to attach to—in nature, this might be a rock, in the lab a microscope slide offered a useful substitute. From there, they grow a tiny polyp that develops into a colony. These colonies are essentially immortal, and they release baby medusae—which over the course of a few weeks grow into the gelatinous, shower-cap-like creatures we call jellyfish. “They’re more like a flower or something,” says Weissbourd. “Their job is to go out and spread seeds.”

Now, researchers have a creature that they can observe under a microscope as it eats (a diet of mashed-up brine shrimp) and folds its body, while the neurons governing those behaviors glow. “You can do really high-resolution experiments, looking at every neuron’s activity over time while the animal is behaving,” says Weissbourd. They can essentially read its mind—and it’s a mind that’s very different from anything we’re familiar with.

File source

 

Infographic: Oceans for Good

Public domain / Pixabay

PUBLISHED DEC 8, 2021 3:11 PM BY UK RESEARCH AND INNOVATION (UKRI)

 

Climate change presents one of the greatest challenges in human history and represents a grave threat to the health of our oceans. The ocean ecosystems that regulate our climate are becoming increasingly threatened by the consequences of human activity, already shown by the rising sea temperatures and ocean acidification. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are continually rising, causing dramatic changes in oceanic chemistry and putting marine life in danger.

Thankfully our oceans have the power to create solutions. They are a natural resource that can be harnessed for good, saving humanity from environmental destruction during this period of rapid global warming.

These vast bodies of water play many crucial roles. They provide food security, regulate rainfall patterns on land surfaces, revitalize coastal areas, and are responsible for sequestering carbon dioxide and aiding ocean life in its fight against climate change.

UK Research and Innovation has produced an Oceans For Good infographic for the post-COP26 conversation on climate targets, and it highlights some of the many benefits of our blue planet.

The Healing Power of the Ocean

Our majestic seas are a force for good when it comes to combating the climate crisis. Some of the key statistics UKRI have highlighted include:

• 50 percent of the oxygen we breathe is produced by ocean’s plants
• 4-6 weeks is the lifecycle of natural biodegradable packaging made from brown seaweed
• 90 percent of the extra heat stored on the planet is held by the open ocean
• 3.5 billion people depend on the ocean as their primary source of food

Much of the ocean science data is taken from the Wave Energy Innovation Position Paper, written by the Supergen Offshore Renewable Energy Hub. This Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council -funded program strives for innovation and development of offshore wind, wave and tidal technology to benefit society.

Other statistics have been derived from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, a charity that aims to develop and apply innovative marine science for our oceans to be free of plastic waste and sustained into the future.

The Ocean is a Life Force

The oceans have been a great equaliser in the fight against climate change. In just 60 years, they have soaked up 90 percent of man-made greenhouse gas emissions and turned them into harmless molecules that will help keep our planet habitable for future generations. Our oceans also provide an enormous 70 percent of the oxygen on Earth, absorb 50 times more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere and provide a sixth of the protein we eat from fish.

Phytoplankton – tiny plant-like organisms that live in the sea – are responsible for at least 50 percent of the oxygen on Earth.

And in the marine family Mytilidae, bivalve molluscs such as mussels act as natural biofilters, efficiently filtering out particles from seawater. Just one square meter of mussel bed can filter an enormous 150,000 liters of water per day. This immense filtering power can potentially be harnessed to remove microplastic pollution from estuarine and coastal waters; by using beds or "bioreefs" of mussels.

Aquatic Foods against Global Hunger: Reducing Food & Nutrition Insecurity

The abundance of marine plants and algae in our oceans supply more food than all land plants combined, with marine microalgae producing protein, Omega-3 fatty acids and many other nutrients. By eliminating reliance on wild-caught fish as a source of Omega-3, we can harness the potential of microalgae as a sustainable alternative source.

Seaweed is another nutrient-rich aquatic food source that offers an alternative to animal-based sources for sustenance when resources may be scarce. Seaweed can support up to 150 times more protein per acre than crops such as rice. Its bioactive extracts also offer wellness benefits, including gut and microbiome health, anti-inflammation and immune stimulation.

Aquatic foods lead the way in the fight against global hunger. Astonishingly, there are 10-100 times more minerals and vitamins found in a dry unit of seaweed compared to animal-derived foods.

In addition, seaweed has the power to absorb carbon dioxide from our atmosphere, decrease ocean eutrophication and have a positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions when used in cattle feed. Sustainable seaweed can lower a cow's methane production by up to 99 percent.

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Ma

 

Insurers Adopt Poseidon Principles for Decarbonization Transparency

PUBLISHED DEC 15, 2021 2:26 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

In an effort to keep the focus on the shipping industry’s progress towards decarbonization, six of the leading insurance companies for the maritime industry are launching an initiative designed to encourage the industry and provide a further level of transparency on carbon initiatives. Called the Poseidon Principles for Marine Insurance, it represents the second expansion of the Poseidon Principles launched in 2019 that enlisted maritime financing and financial institutions in addressing global environmental issues.

Launched in Europe today under the auspices of the Global Maritime Forum, an international not-for-profit organization committed to promoting sustainability in global seaborne trade, the committee that developed the new charter says that the Poseidon Principles for Marine Insurance are a framework to quantitatively assess and disclose the climate alignment of marine insurers’ underwriting portfolios. In addition to the leading insurers and related organizations, members from the shipping community, including A.P. Moller-Maersk and Star Bulk as well as Lloyd’s Register, participated in the effort.

“We are pleased to see leading marine insurers join forces with signatories to the Poseidon Principles and the Sea Cargo Charter in establishing a framework to quantitively assess and disclose the climate alignment of their underwriting portfolios, and raising the bar for everyone by doing so relative to the goal of full decarbonization of international shipping,” said Johannah Christensen, CEO at Global Maritime Forum in support of the new initiative. “Alongside other stakeholders in the maritime value chain, the insurance industry has the influence and responsibility to drive progress.”

After the financial industry launched the Poseidon Principles, charterers followed suit with their initiative inspired by the same guidelines. Announced in October 2020, seventeen of the leading charterers committed to transparency showing the alignment of their efforts with the shipping industry’s decarbonization. The Sea Cargo Charter set a benchmark for responsible shipping and transparent climate reporting is seen as a tool to use charters to drive the shipping industry’s decarbonization progress.

Signatories to the new Poseidon Principles for Marine Insurance, which include as founders Swiss Re, Gard, Hellenic Hull Management, SCOR, Victor International, and Norwegian Hull Club, commit to assessing and disclosing the climate alignment of their hull and machinery portfolios. Under the new principles, they will benchmark their portfolios against two trajectories. One is linked to a 50 percent reduction of annual CO2 emissions by 2050 compared to 2008 and the other is linked to a 100 percent reduction of emissions by 2050. 

“As risk managers, insurers and investors, the insurance industry has a key role in supporting the transition to a net-zero economy. The Poseidon Principles will serve our institutions as well as our clients to quantitatively assess and disclose the climate alignment of their underwriting portfolios and thus improve decision-making at a strategic level and shape a sustainable future for all. The disclosure framework provided by the Poseidon Principles will enable us to credibly report our progress towards net-zero insurance using granular marine data,” said Patrizia Kern, Marine Head at Swiss Re Corporate Solutions and Chair of the drafting committee for the Poseidon Principles for Marine Insurance. 

The Poseidon Principles for Marine Insurance is also the first sector-specific methodology to emerge in support of the UN lead Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA) which was launched in the summer of 2021. Eight of the world’s leading insurers and reinsurers established the alliance where members commit to transitioning their underwriting portfolios to net-zero GHG emissions by 2050.

The group plans to continue to expand the framework to further support a zero-emissions future for the shipping industry. They said they planned to add a third trajectory to the principles to align the full decarbonization trajectory with zero-lifecycle GHG emissions to meet the ambition of net-zero commitments such as the NZIA. In addition to the six founding members, brokers and other key stakeholders in marine insurance are committing to supporting the principles as affiliate members and aligning with the goal of decarbonizing international shipping by 2050. Affiliate members supporting the principles are Willis Towers Watson, Cefor, and EF Marine, and additional marine insurers are expected to join in the future.

 

Project to Turn Sewage and Wastewater from Cargo Ships into Biogas

HaminaKotka is one of Finland's busiest seaports and first to start marine wastewater recycling (Port Authority)

PUBLISHED DEC 9, 2021 2:33 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

The seaport of HaminaKotka located on the Gulf of Finland has launched an innovative demonstration project that will convert sewage and wastewater from commercial ships operating in the Baltic into biogas. While the project is currently voluntary, the hope is that it will serve as a model for other ports and will contribute to efforts to clean the Baltic, which is among the most polluted bodies of water in the world.

“We can achieve our objective of a cleaner Baltic Sea, one ship, one port and one country at a time,” says Elisa Mikkolainen, Project Director of the Baltic Sea Action Group. An NGO dedicated to cleaning the waterways. “The nutrient load on the sea decreases every time wastewater is discharged at the port. We need extensive cooperation to succeed in our mission.”

Approximately 2,000 ships are operating in the Baltic Sea at any given moment, the group explains, and 95 percent of them are cargo ships. They estimate that those ships have approximately 25,000 seafarers aboard producing tons of sewage and wastewater from their daily operations.

Currently, despite the increasing regulations on ballast water, there are no regulations to prevent these ships from discharging waste into the Baltic. It is legal to discharge greywater, sewage, and ground food waste into the Baltic. Passenger ships, such as the ferries operating between Finland, Sweden, and Estonia, however, have been voluntarily for the past several years been discharging their wastewater at the port. Starting this year, IMO regulations also prohibit discharges of untreated sewage from passenger ships in the Baltic Sea.

The wastewater being discharged by the ships includes food waste and contains, for example, nutrients, bacteria, fats, chemicals, and microplastics. The NGO highlights that these elements are accelerating two of the worst problems of the Baltic Sea: eutrophication and oxygen depletion.

The Baltic Sea Action Group’s two-year program for the management of maritime greywater, which was supported through funding from the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund’s Finnish Operational Program, sought to develop processes to make it simple for all vessels to stop discharges. According to the group, all discharge into the sea is unnecessary and all waste from ships should be discharged at the port and recovered. The new voluntary measures they believe will lead the way for responsible operators both on land and at sea.

The port of HaminaKotka is the first location to participate. The water management company in the region, Kymen Vesi, treats the sewage discharged by cargo ships at the port and is sampling the water to develop further data for the project. The wastewater sludge created in the process is refined into renewable energy at Gasum’s biogas plant and will be used as a fuel for trucks. 

“The port of HaminaKotka is the largest general port in Finland, visited by approximately 2,500 cargo ships every year. We want to encourage the ships to discharge their wastewater at the port. Our sewage reception and treatment facilities meet the requirements of the circular economy,” says Suvi-Tuuli Lappalainen, Development Manager at the Port of HaminaKotka.

A broad range of shipping companies, including Stolt Tankers and Maersk, along with shipping agencies have agreed to participate in the program.

 

Op-Ed: Green Shipping Must Go Beyond Decarbonization

The wreck of the X-Press Pearl off Colombo, Sri Lanka (Sri Lankan Navy)

PUBLISHED DEC 10, 2021 1:05 PM BY CHRISTIAN BUEGER AND DR. JAN STOCKBRUEGGER

 

The shipping industry is the backbone of global trade and supply chains, with 90 percent of all goods transported by the sea. The Suez Canal closure or logistical challenges due to the COVID-19 crisis have demonstrated our dependency on maritime supply chains.

Yet the shipping industry is also a major polluter. It contributes up to three percent to global CO2 and greenhouse gasses. Reducing these emissions is vital to reach the climate targets of the 2015 Paris agreement. Yet shipping was not included in the Paris Agreement. The basic problem: Since shipping implies the transfer of goods from one country to another, to which one should the emissions be attributed?

Drawing on the efforts at the main regulatory body for global shipping, the International Maritime Organization, at a new milestone in shipping’s green energy transition was achieved at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow.

22 countries – including the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, and France – signed the so-called Clydebank Declaration. The aim of the initiative: to establish ‘green shipping corridors’ – that is zero-emission maritime routes between two or more ports where ships using clean marine fuels can operate. This is a major logistical and technological challenge. It requires significant research and infrastructure investments to ensure the availability of green fuels such as methanol in participating ports along these corridors.

Yet the Clydebank Declaration is also a major governance challenge. A declaration is not a legally binding treaty through which states can be held accountable. The declaration also does not indicate who has the authority and oversight to secure funding, develop rules, and ensure compliance with green shipping standards. Will it be the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee or another international body? Who will oversee and monitor progress?

Establishing green shipping corridors is crucial to reduce shipping’s greenhouse gas and CO2 emissions. But is this enough to “green” shipping? To address this question, we need to consider how climate change affects global shipping and maritime supply chains. Global warming will affect the oceans in many ways, including water temperatures, wind patterns, marine currents, and fish stocks. Yet global warming will also increase the intensity and frequency of storms at sea. This is a major threat to marine shipping and poses challenges for ocean governance.

Research by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) suggests that climate change will lead to an increase in extreme weather over tropical oceans. NASA finds that there have been more category 4 and 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic in recent years. This increases the risk of dangerous shipping accidents that cause pollution and environmental catastrophes. 

Shipping accidents and oil spills are already a major environmental problem. Such accidents occur more frequently than one might imagine. The European Maritime Safety Agency reported over 3,000 marine casualties and incidents and accidents in 2019, 63 of which resulted in significant pollution.

Two recent shipping accidents demonstrate the magnitude of the problem: The  X-Press Pearl caught fire in June 2021. It eventually sank and polluted beaches and fishing grounds off Sri Lanka. One year before, an accident involving the MV Wakashio caused a major oil spill that destroyed pristine marine ecosystems off Mauritius – another island paradise. And just last month, about 588 barrels of oil leaked from a pipeline off California. The pipeline had been damaged by a ship anchor.

Decarbonizing shipping and other industries will reduce the harm from such accidents. Yet this will take decades, and in the meantime, ships will rely on fossil fuels to run their engines. Paradoxically, green fuels such as hydrogen (and natural gas) are also highly inflammable and could cause major accidents, including new forms of environmental damage which are not fully understood yet. Indeed, some commentators have referred to the new fuels as Frankenstein fuels, highlighting how poor our knowledge is of how these impact the environment or how the damage from spills can be contained.

The loss of containers at sea is another threat to the marine environment linked to climate change and extreme weather conditions at sea. The shipping giant Maersk lost over 1,000 containers in two incidents this year. The content of these containers and the potential damages they could cause remains unclear. Containers break up slowly over time and some of their content which may include toxic materials or plastic, will pollute deep sea ecosystems and shorelines. Maersk attributed both incidents to rough seas, a phenomenon that is likely to increase in the future due to climate change.

More efforts are needed to prevent and mitigate environmental disasters caused by climate-related marine and shipping accidents. One way to do this is by enhancing safety standards on vessels. Yet states also need to be better prepared to respond to shipping accidents and to contain oil spills and marine pollution. Building shipping accident response capabilities at the IMO and other organizations is vital to protect the marine environment against the effects of climate change and ensure that the costs of damage will not escalate.

What happens out at sea hardly gets the attention it needs. The shipping industry often is far remote from our daily lives. Greening shipping is vital to address climate change and rescue the oceans and its biodiversity. Green shipping corridors are an important step, but we need to think beyond the sheer logistics of providing fuels in ports and consider other sources of environmental harm related to global warming.

Christian Bueger is Professor of International Relations at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on global governance and international organization, the oceans and maritime security, international relations theory and the sociology of expertise. 

Dr. Jan Stockbruegger is a Ph.D. graduate of the Department of Political Science at Brown University and an affiliate at the Climate Solution Lab at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. His research focuses on maritime security, ocean governance and order-building at sea.

 

Samsung Heavy Finds a Buyer for Unwanted Ultradeepwater Drillship

An Ocean Rig drillship in 2016, before the firm was acquired (File image courtesy FAR Limited)

PUBLISHED DEC 3, 2021 12:06 AM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

Samsung Heavy Industries has found a buyer for an unwanted high-spec drillship that was canceled three years ago. 

Long-defunct driller Ocean Rig ordered the ultradeepwater drillship Ocean Rig Crete back in 2014, with delivery scheduled in three years. When oil prices plummeted in 2015, the company delayed the rig's delivery by another year, citing deteriorating market conditions. 

The market did not recover, and Ocean Rig was forced to file for a prepackaged bankruptcy in 2017. In September 2018, after the bankruptcy proceeding, competitor Transocean bought Ocean Rig for $2.7 billion and absorbed its fleet. Transocean also took over the rights to two drillships still under construction, Ocean Rig Crete and sister ship Ocean Rig Santorini.

In 2019, with the market still oversupplied and showing few signs of improvement, Transocean canceled both rig orders - saving Transocean about $1.1 billion and leaving Samsung Heavy Industries with two unfinished hulls. 

This week, SHI announced that it has found an unnamed European buyer who will pay $245 million for Ocean Rig Crete in finished form. The price is a steep markdown: in 2017, the vessel was valued at about $425 million, and the original order value was even higher. If all goes well and the buyer confirms the agreement, the vessel will be delivered in the first quarter of 2023.

SHI has already made the unusual decision to finish the Ocean Rig Santorini on its own, without a buyer. In a novel arrangement, the renamed Samsung Santorini will be bareboat-chartered to Saipem for a two-year period beginning in late 2021. The contract provides Saipem with an option to buy if it likes the rig and market conditions support a sale. 

"Santorini increases our production capacity and allows us to meet the demand for new contracts at a stage in which Saipem’s current offshore drilling fleet has almost full contractual coverage for the next few months," said Saipem's COO of Drilling Offshore, Marco Toninelli. 

With both of the unwanted Ocean Rig newbuilds headed off to work at last, SHI has whittled its backstock of canceled drillships down to three. In a statement, the firm said that it is looking to sell all of them as soon as possible.