(87a) Designing Green Corridors for Sustainable Maritime Transportation

Maritime transportation is responsible for over 2% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions [1]. The current target set by the International Maritime Organization is to reduce the international shipping sector’s annual GHG emissions by at least 50% compared to 2008 by 2050. To achieve this goal, the industry needs to quickly transition toward the use of zero-emission marine fuels and vessels. Promising sustainable alternative marine fuels, such as ammonia and methanol, are being investigated; however, in addition to retrofitting ships to run on these fuels, their large-scale deployment also requires a new infrastructure that ensures reliable and economic fuel supply. In this context, the notion of green corridors has emerged recently. Here, a green corridor refers to a shipping trade route along which alternative fuel production facilities, distribution networks, and bunkering infrastructures are put in place to support sustainable maritime transportation on that route [2].

In this work, we investigate the design of green corridors where, given shipping demands between different ports, one needs to determine the locations and capacities of fuel production plants, storage facilities, and bunkering ports such that all fuel demands can be satisfied. We consider both shore-to-ship and ship-to-ship bunkering, where the latter requires the use of bunker vessels. Also, production facilities can be constructed both on- and offshore [3], where candidate locations may differ significantly in the cost of fuel production from renewable resources at those locations. We model the problem by combining a discrete facility location and a set covering formulation, which results in a mixed-integer linear program. The optimization model is applied to two real-world case studies, which involve the Australia-Japan iron ore route and the Asia-Europe container route, to assess the potential benefit and cost of establishing global green corridors.

References:

[1] International Maritime Organization (2021). Fourth IMO GHG Study 2020.

[2] The Getting to Zero Coalition (2021). The Next Wave: Green Corridors.

[3] Wang, H., Daoutidis, P., & Zhang, Q. (2021). Harnessing the wind power of the ocean with green offshore ammonia. ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, 9, 14605-14617.