Even if you can ignore the horrible headlines revolving around multiple hostilities, there is not much to be cheerful about in the maritime world today. In what might be thought of as the final curtain, after a three centuries’ drama in the birthplace of the industrial revolution, the UK brought to end its capacity for steelmaking and an ability to generate electricity from coal on a single day this week.
As if all the political instability in the world was of no consequence, the incoming Labour government thought it the perfect time to call a halt to the issuance of new licenses for the extraction of oil and gas around the UK effectively telling some 130,000 workers in the sector that they were on borrowed time.
This week, at the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), the MEPC, assailed as always by the activists who emerge on such occasions, was attempting to move its agenda for “net zero” shipping a few steps further. For the shipping industry, hoping to seek some certainties about the way forward, bearing in mind the need to replace a world fleet against the politically driven deadlines, one can foresee only further disappointment.
The fact is that there are no obvious alternatives to the huge quantities of fossil fuel that currently drive global deep-sea ships. The various “candidate” fuels that are proposed may have their enthusiastic lobbies supporting them, but the questions of scale, cost, and the various technical or environmental deficiencies lurking in each of them invariably arise.
As if the technical problems could be solved, the politics of how this is to be financially finagled, through carbon levies, emission trading, or whatever, in a fashion that is judged “fair” by less advantaged member states would surely have left Solomon struggling.
The industry itself does not get the credit it deserves for at least attempting to show itself willing, despite the imposition of impractical political targets and deadlines. Scarcely a week elapses without several announcements of some technical innovation that will reduce emissions, fuel usage, or otherwise improve efficiency.
Engine and machinery manufacturers have worked miracles while shipowners have been willing to buy their innovative ideas, and have invested a great deal. But it will never be enough, while climate activists capture the media agenda and focus on every negative they can discover, to demand more and more.
It was an old Greek shipowner who, many years ago, told me that a successful operator must learn to run the fleet “despite” the efforts of governments rather than hoping that any political support or encouraging policy changes might be forthcoming. You just get on and do what you can to turn a profit, he said, to invest when able, hoping that some daft regulatory change does not make this impossible.
He seemed to be remarkably successful, although that was before the first alarms of the “diesel death zones” became a strident call to “just stop oil” and the assumptions of climate change became the “emergency” or “catastrophe” we have ringing round our ears today.
In an era where the eco-warriors have made otherwise sensible policy-makers bend to their various insanities, it is difficult to see where all this is going to end. The greens have leaned on their friends in the European Commission to rule that LNG, which is regarded as the most positive alternative bunker fuel, is to be defined as “transitional” so can, like oil, be eventually phased out.
Some early birds have moved into methanol, but nobody seriously has suggested how the greener varieties can provide sufficient quantities for a growing global fleet. Even ammonia has its enthusiasts, even though it might need the duty engineers enclosed in a gas-tight control room capsule, like astronauts.
And as for bio-fuel – if this is the answer, say its nay-sayers – we will starve. If the simple solution is – as asserted by the eco-warriors who threw soup over priceless works of art – “just stop oil,” the lights really will go out.
They might well get their way, but in the more sensible parts of the world where priorities are more rational, we can be cheered by the news that they are drilling like mad.