Can ‘Green Corridors’ Tackle Shipping’s Giant Carbon Footprint?

by Isabelle Gerretsen (China Dialogue) At last year’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, 22 countries, including the UK, US, Germany and Japan, signed up to the Clydebank Declaration, announcing their intention to establish various zero-emissions shipping routes known as “green corridors”. By 2025, the aim is to have set up at least six such corridors, which would each run between two or more ports. By 2030, it is hoped many more routes will be operational.

Dissatisfied by the IMO’s slow decision-making, countries are taking matters into their own hands by establishing green corridors. These aim to accelerate the uptake of zero-emissions fuels on vessels travelling between major shipping hubs and establish the necessary regulation, infrastructure and technology.

“In practice, you’re creating a special economic zone,” said Aparajit Pandey, shipping lead at the Energy Transitions Commission. “It’s a targeted area where fuel production and port infrastructure can be built up super quickly and efficiently and where safety procedures and regulations can be put in place.”

The green corridors will allow countries to identify which decarbonisation solutions are scalable, said Katherine Palmer, shipping lead on the UN High-Level Climate Champions team. They are a “testbed” that provide “an evidence base to show policymakers what is possible,” she said. “They give them confidence in what can be done.”

The green corridors aim to incentivise the uptake of zero-emissions fuels by putting pricing mechanisms in place. This could be in the form of subsidies initially, such as feed-in tariffs, and eventually through carbon pricing, said Palmer.

The two fuels that will power green corridors are methanol and “green” ammonia, which are both deemed to be zero-carbon if they are generated from renewable sources. “In the near term, methanol is the better fit because there’s availability, but in the long term, green ammonia is likely to be the fuel of choice for decarbonising the shipping industry,” said Pandey.

The cost to build new vessels and convert existing ones to run on methanol is significantly lower than for alternative zero-carbon fuels. Ammonia, which is a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen, contains no carbon and so does not emit any CO2 when used to fuel an internal combustion engine.

Zero-emissions vessels will also require huge amounts of new infrastructure to produce and store the fuels and allow ships to refuel at ports. And the production of sustainable fuels must ramp up. Currently less than 0.2 million tonnes of renewable methanol is produced annually and ammonia production relies heavily on fossil fuels.

Both methanol and ammonia are derived from hydrogen, so countries will need to invest in electrolysers and renewable energy capacity, mainly wind and solar, to produce these fuels, as well as battery and hydrogen storage, said Pandey. Most of this will have to be built at or near the participating ports, as hydrogen is costly to transport.

Despite not joining the declaration, China is participating in the first green corridor. The ports of Los Angeles and Shanghai agreed in January to work on developing a plan for a zero-emission route by the end of 2022.

The Trans-Pacific corridor, as it is known, is the world’s busiest cargo route. In 2020, ships moved 31.2 million 20-foot unit containers – 21% of the world’s total – across the Pacific Ocean. Katherine Palmer said the corridor has strong first-mover potential because it carries out liner trade, which means goods are transported along a fixed route on a regular schedule.

Similar initiatives are being explored. A working paper by the ICCT analysed the technical feasibility of a zero-emissions container corridor running on hydrogen fuels cells between Shenzhen and Long Beach, a similar but longer route than LA–Shanghai. It concluded that 99% of the voyages it studied – all those that travelled the route in 2015 – could be powered by hydrogen, “with only minor changes to fuel capacity or operations”.

One vital change is the need for ports to identify refuelling points en route, as alternative fuels do not have the range of fossil fuels, said Elise Georgeff, an associate researcher on the ICCT’s marine programme team. For the Shenzhen–Long Beach route, she points to the Aleutian Islands, off the coast of Alaska, as a natural halfway point for refuelling.

It is still early days for the green corridor concept but work to identify and promote other potential routes is underway. These include the Australia–Japan iron ore corridor and the Asia–Europe container corridor, according to the “Next Wave: Green Corridors” report, published by the Global Maritime Forum and World Economic Forum and co-authored by Pandey.

Palmer said that more intra-European green corridors should be expected within the next decade. The European Union has been leading the way in decarbonising its shipping industry through a range of measures, including a sustainable fuel mandate within the EU and the inclusion of maritime emissions in the bloc’s emissions trading scheme (ETS). READ MORE