New Ship Efficiency Portal Launched
At the World Ocean Council’s Sustainable Ocean Summit on Wednesday, Carbon War Room, exactEarth, and University Maritime Advisory Service (UMAS) launched BetterFleet, a free-to-access ship operational efficiency portal on ShippingEfficiency.org.
Based on similar data and methods used by the IMO to assess the world fleet, BetterFleet shows how efficiently an individual vessel has operated over the past year and compares it against its peers.
BetterFleet provides free-to-access efficiency data to support the shipping industry’s many different stakeholders, and particularly those who use it as part of their supply chain, to understand the comparative energy efficiency of different vessels and identify actions to reduce emissions and costs.
Galen Hon, shipping operation manager with Carbon War Room, says: “BetterFleet illustrates where and how much efficiency varies for ships, in order to identify potential sources of inefficiencies, find opportunities to optimize operations, and reduce costs for everyone. It will also empower owners to begin conversations with their charterers and shippers about how operations affect the bottom line, carbon emissions, and the environment.”
The BetterFleet portal will allow any registered user to search by ship name or IMO number to see the performance of that vessel over a 12-month period. BetterFleet displays metrics and visuals to provide a holistic view of the ship’s operation:
• An “out of ten” score summarizing the overall performance of the ship over the previous 12 months compared with ships of similar type and size
• An overview of the magnitude and frequency of estimated operational efficiency variations for the individual vessel and for all the vessels of the same type and size, measured in grams of CO2 per ton-mile of freight transported
• A world map depicting the voyages of the vessel over the same time period
BetterFleet is based on AIS data and the best publicly available data processed through state-of-the-art models similar to those used for the Third IMO GHG Study. The portal currently includes a large portion of the tanker, bulk carrier and container ship fleets, and more vessel types and sizes will be added over time.
It is not intended to be better than or replace the information shipowners obtain directly from their vessels. It is meant to be the best data of its kind that is publicly available in order to enable comparison. It is designed to allow anyone — shipowner, cargo-owner or others — to see an overview of a specific ship’s performance. BetterFleet, and the models and data it is based on, will continue to improve and evolve over time to support the needs of the industry.
The BetterFleet project is made possible by a grant from Dutch Postcode Lottery, which recently granted €1 million ($1.09 million) to Carbon War Room and Rocky Mountain Institute to expand their impact in the shipping industry.