Inland, Short Sea & Deep Water Shipping Will Sail Different Decarbonization Routes
Different segments of shipping have different concerns and considerations and so have different climate solutions available to them
In the first article in this look at decarbonizing maritime freight, the question of future tonnage of freight led to the inevitable conclusion that shipping would decline as we stopped extracting and shipping 20 billion tons of fossil fuels annually. But all ships are not created equal and as we electrify everything everywhere all at once, it’s important to tease apart the segments further.
At a coarse level, there are three types of shipping, transoceanic or deepwater routes, short sea or near shore routes and inland shipping. There’s a little overlap, especially between the latter two. But the ships that cross the oceans are much bigger than the ones transiting between Norway and Germany or powering up the Yangtze.
This perspective required me to review multiple public datasets to determine the rough percentages of shipping in each of these categories. Unsurprisingly…
