EMERGE deliverable 6.1. Baltic and North Sea report

Report, 2023

Shipping is responsible for a range of different pressures affecting air quality, climate, and the marine environment. However, most social and economic analysis of shipping have focused on air pollution assessment and how shipping may impact climate change and human health. This risks policies to be biased towards air pollution and climate change, while trading off impacts on the marine environment. One example is the IMO’s global sulphur cap, which requires shipowners to use a compliant fuel with a sulphur content of 0.5% (0.1% in SECA regions) or use alternative compliance options (scrubbers) that are effective in reducing sulphur oxide (SOX) emissions to the atmosphere. The scrubber process results in large volumes of acidic discharge water. Although regulations primarily target SOX removal, other pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and metals are transferred from the exhausts to the wash water and subsequently discharged to the marine environment. The aim of this deliverable has therefore been to develop a holistic framework to evaluate the impacts of shipping emissions, particularly those related to scrubbers, on the marine environment, human health, climate, and economy. The structure of this deliverable follows the well-established DAPSIR (Driver-Activity-Pressure-State-Impact-Response) framework, under which information, findings and conclusions from previous work packages are synthesized and integrated, including experiments of direct emissions from shipping to the marine environment (WP2) and the atmosphere (WP3), assessment of marine environmental impacts (WP2, WP4 and WP6), as well as human health and climate change impacts (WP5 and WP6). Finally, this deliverable provides recommendations and guidance for stakeholders and policymakers.
The assessment is performed using a baseline scenario (year 2018) and three future scenarios (for year 2050) based on different projected future developments of shipping transport volumes and considering the development of ships regarding fuel efficiency and ship size. In this deliverable, we focused primarily on two of the different future scenarios, scenario 3 (high scrubber pressure) and scenario 8 (high use of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and methanol). The marine environmental risk assessment, performed in the Öresund region for the baseline scenario (2018), showed unacceptable risks when ships in the area were using open loop scrubbers. In the assessment, modelled predicted environmental concentrations (PECs) of open loop scrubber discharge water exceeded the tolerable marine threshold value (predicted no-effect concentration, PNEC) in almost the entire Öresund region. The PEC value was derived based on ship activity and discharges of scrubber water in 2018, while the PNEC value was derived based on the ecotoxicological assays performed within the EMERGE project. Notably, the modelling of open loop scrubber discharge water was performed using the ship traffic activity in 2018 when less than 200 ships in the Baltic Sea used scrubbers, collectively releasing 192 million tonnes of discharge water. By 2022 there were approximately 800 ships equipped with scrubbers in the Baltic Sea. In the high scrubber future scenario (S3) in 2050 this led to an assumption of the considerably higher scrubber water discharge (1740 million tonnes), representing almost one order of magnitude higher compared to our baseline scenario in 2018.
In addition, our impact assessment, following Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) guidelines, shows that a ban on discharge water from scrubbers should be considered in the entire Baltic and North Sea region, since all sea basins in the region fail to reach good environmental status (GES) as defined by the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (Directive 2008/56/EC). However, the costs of such a measure for the shipping sector (banning discharges from scrubbers, i.e., in practice a ban on scrubbers) have been questioned within the International Maritime Organisation (IMO). Therefore, EMERGE also focused on analysing to what extent the global scrubber fleet has reached break-even on their scrubber installations and the potential monetary gain of using Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) as compared to the more expensive Marine Gas Oil (MGO) or Very Low Sulphur Fuel Oil (VLSFO). Our results showed that 51% of the global scrubber fleet had reached break-even by the end of 2022, resulting in a summarised balance of 4.7 billion €2019. In addition, the marine ecotoxicity damage cost, by not restricting scrubbers in the Baltic Sea Area, accumulated to >680 million €2019 from 2015 to end of 2022.
For air quality, both future scenarios showed a decrease in shipping contribution to PM2.5 exposure by a factor of 2 to 3 compared to our baseline scenario in 2018. Scenario 8 is somewhat more efficient in decreasing the shipping originated PM2.5 than scenario 3. Using the Greenhouse gas and Air pollution Interactions and Synergies (GAINS) model for human health impact assessment in scenario 3 revealed the loss of life expectancy in most areas around the Baltic Sea, when considering all sources, to be limited to two to four months. However, the differences in life shortening between Scenarios 3 and 8 are two to three orders of magnitude lower when compared to human health impacts resulting from all sources, indicating that scrubbers alone have a minor impact on human health in the Baltic region from air quality perspective. For Öresund case the shipping-related health impacts from PM2.5 represented approximately 10% of the total burden of air pollution, in 2050 scenario simulations this burden decreased to 7-9%. Important improvement of air quality in the scenario simulations come also from reduction of NO2 which is a criteria pollutant regulated by the Air Quality Directive, where the decrease is 3 to 5-fold. In relative terms the shipping contribution to NO2 concentration levels, however, maintains similar, approximately 25%, as the land emissions are also expected to decrease. The GAINS health impact assessment for the Baltic Sea was compared to the Solent region using a statistical technique. The latter study showed that a relatively small fraction of all premature deaths in Southampton, Portsmouth, Poole, Christchurch & Bournemouth are attributable to air pollution from shipping, corroborating the conclusion that the deployment scrubbers alone has a minor impact on human life shortening through atmospheric transport.