Maritime emissions have long time been a low priority issue for policy makers. However, maritime emissions will be included in the European National Emission Ceilings (NEC) and as maritime transport is increasing rapidly, its share in emissions is thought to become more significant.So maritime emissions are becoming more important for national and international policy makers, and pressure is rising to reduce emissions. As such, policy makers need a tool to estimate current emissions and to asses the impact of policy measures on emissions, especially with respect to harbor emissions. To this end, we have constructed an emission model to calculate and distribute maritime emissions geographically. Furthermore, we modeled future emissions starting from a traffic prognosis, taking into account fleet renewal, technological improvement, existing legislation, and increase (or decrease) of ship size. For Belgian maritime emissions, we found that total maritime emissions have been increasing slowly from 1990 to 2005, yet slower then traffic, e.g., NOx emissions increased 23% while traffic increased 36%. We furthermore found that more than half of all emissions are in-port emissions.With the model we calculated the effect of two policy measures: first, MARPOL annex VI concerning NOx emission standards, and second, European guideline 2005/33/EC concerning the sulphur content of maritime fuel. We found that the MARPOL annex had no significant impact on NOx emissions, while the European guideline will decrease emissions of SO2 in harbors to 36% in 2010 compared to 1990. Emissions of maritime transport are increasing rapidly. In a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, emissions per traffic will decrease slowly, although measures to reduce emissions are available (shore-side electricity, exhaust aftertreatment, fuel quality,…) and can reduce emissions significantly. |
