Abatement Emission System Expected to Reduce Emissions on Large Ships

Ecospec Global Technology, a Singapore based environmental company, has been focusing its marketing efforts of its new emission abatement system towards the shipping industry. The company so far reports that it has signed an agreement with Dutch Shipping company ForestWave Navigation. That agreement calls for Forestwave to equip six of its new ships with Ecospec’s CSNOx emission abatement systems. Ecospec has also reported that it is in discussions with other shipping companies and has formed partnerships with several onshore industrial operations to install its CSNOx systems.

Ecospec’s CSNOx technology has received much attention over the last year. It not only received the “Environmental Protection” award at Seatrade Asia in June 2009, but also won the “Technology of the Year” award at the Green Ship Technology Conference 2010 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

One of the major reasons for these awards is that it dramatically reduces emissions while not compromising engine efficiency. According to Mr. Chew Hwee Hong, Founder and Managing Director of Ecospec, CSNOx is a major breakthrough for the global shipping and onshore industries. No other single piece of commercially available equipment is capable of removing all harmful emissions in one process; and with its compact size, the CSNOx meets the most demanding space constraint problems on board ships. In addition, it does not require ships to switch to lower-sulfur fuel, which costs more. For land-based, onshore industries, this would give conventional facilities like fossil fuel power generating plants a convenient, low-cost solution to reducing their carbon footprint.”

Besides the awards and claims by the company, as recently as January 2010, the Houston-based American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) verified that the new technology does what it says. Using a 100,000-ton tanker sailing from Singapore to the Middle East via Sri Lanka as the test vessel. The “ABS verification showed the CSNOx effectively removing 99% of SO2, 77% of CO2, and 66%of NOx – results that place emissions well within the latest requirements of the International Maritime Organization and other international regulations.” These results have improved since an initial testing of the CSNOx onboard an Aframax tanker in December 2008. For that test, the CSNOx system reduced SO2 by 92.9 percent, NOx by 82.2 percent, and CO2 by 74.4 percent.

Ecospec’s new technology is expected to reduce the shipping industry’s share of emissions which have been estimated at 3 percent of the total global CO2, SO2 and NOx emissions. More importantly though, the new technology is expected to keep a lid on ship emission growth; which has increased by more than 42 percent since 1990.

Although trucks still lead the way in emissions, accounting for somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of emissions in the United States, stricter laws are expected to reduce the emissions from both trucks and boats in the years to come. Such regulations are expected to reduce emissions from trucks by about 80 percent from 2002 levels. With the new technology from Ecospec, however, emissions from freight ships have the potential to drop even more and even sooner, potentially making freight shipping the greenest alternative available