Using digital tools to improve your ship’s CII and lower its carbon levies

New international and regional regulations are ratcheting up the pressure to reduce air pollution from shipping, requiring operators to gain greater insight into how much fuel they are consuming, and where they can improve their performance. To ensure compliance, shipowners will need reliable platforms to monitor, track and compile their fuel consumption and CO2 emissions data.

A thorough analysis of this data will be pivotal to enhancing a vessel’s performance to stay in compliance with IMO’s progressively stricter Carbon Intensity Indicator (CII) and lower its fuel consumption and CO2 levy under the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), which goes into effect 1 January 2024.

This is exactly why ABS unveiled ABS Wavesight last year at the International Workboat Show in New Orleans. Through its two digital platforms, Nautical Systems and My Digital Fleet, the ABS-affiliated software-as-a-service (SasS) company wants to reduce operational risk and cost, providing real-time insight tools to calculate and improve CII ratings and track and improve fuel consumption and carbon tax obligations.

“Momentum has been building within shipping for the solutions,” says ABS Wavesight president, Paul Sells, noting the company has experienced “tremendous growth” doubling in size since its launch nine months ago, and hiring coding professionals from both maritime and the broader technology industry.

“Shipowners can get all the consumption and performance information in one place”

While noting ABS Wavesight is “not a startup” funded by venture capital, but an organisation backed by a 160-year-old class society, Mr Sells says the company’s rapid growth is about “getting new features as fast to market as possible to help owners meet emerging regulations.”

Mr Sells explains My Digital Fleet (MDF) measures and monitors carbon emissions, fuel consumption, and the “intricacies of vessel performance” to enable data-driven decisions to optimise ship energy consumption.

Shipowners are using the software to combine information from their fleets or from individual vessels within their fleet to enhance their CII performance, says Mr Sells. “Those vessels may have varying degrees of instrumentation and may be different types of vessels, such as an LNG carrier or bulker. But shipowners can get all the consumption and performance information in one place. Then, using the tools within MDF, they can make decisions about a potential charterparty agreement. So, what would be the forecasted impact of the CII rating of my vessel for a given set of charterparty parameters? This enables an owner to make a more informed decision about the outcomes of a particular charterparty on the value of his asset,” he says.

Mr Sells says shipowners can use the software to monitor their EU ETS budget, tracking their payments for the year. “The system’s modelling capabilities can monitor the potential EU ETS penalty from a given voyage,” he says.

The solution uses AI to help improve vessel performance. To train the platform’s AI, ABS Wavesight uses constrained historical training datasets where the operational characteristics of the vessel are known, explains Mr Sells. “In the future, the right strategy will be to use more data to get better outcomes from these large vessel performance models.”