Sea-Intelligence analyses Ocean Alliance carbon calculators

Sea-Intelligence regularly analyses the online carbon emissions calculators provided by the ocean carriers. Over the past 13 years, a significant discrepancy between the results has been shown.

The recent Sea-Intelligence analysis focuses on Ocean Alliance, as all member carriers have publicly available carbon calculators. Additionally, the analysis specifically focuses on shipping 1 TEU on the Shanghai to Rotterdam route.

The CMA CGM data include results for three out of the five Ocean Alliance services, as the remaining two operate Rotterdam-Shanghai on the backhaul due to the routing sequence.

Evergreen and OOCL provide a measure for all five services, with OOCL also including their non-alliance LLX service. COSCO only provides a single measurement, for their AEU3 service.

The emissions per service for 1 TEU are shown in Figure 1 (below). The huge difference in emissions is quite evident here.

According to Sea-Intelligence, hypothetically, it would be possible to reduce emissions by 71%, by shifting from CMA CGM to OOCL.

“This is of course not true, as the cargo moves on the same underlying vessel, but it does reflect huge differences in methodology, notably that CMA CGM uses Well-to-Wake. If we keep CMA-CGM out of the comparison to avoid this specific issue and instead only benchmark OOCL with Evergreen, we get a hypothetical savings in carbon emissions of up to 42%. Again, this is simply not possible, as the service is the same,” Sea-Intelligence explains.

“Consequently, shippers can’t use the carriers’ carbon calculators, for any kind of meaningful comparative analysis. In their own right, some calculators might be methodologically sound. However, over the years, the carriers have begun diverting even more in their methodological choices, bringing us to a point, where it is now even less informative from a comparative standpoint than 13 years ago, when we first did this analysis,” Sea-Intelligence concludes.

Credit: Sea-Intelligence