VPS-owned Yxney Maritime on Wednesday (7 September) said it has launched its CORE emissions tracking software aimed at enabling low carbon shipping players to reach their green goals and gain a competitive edge amid growing market and regulatory pressure. 

The emissions monitoring and forecasting tool will harness data from a total of more than 100 vessels across the global fleets of Norwegian shipowners Solstad Offshore and Siem Offshore to augment their existing VPS suite of Maress and NOxDigital solutions geared to data-driven decarbonisation.

Both companies are taking the digital initiative to get ahead of possible regulations to curb ship emissions in the offshore sector as well as counter higher fuel costs due to Norway’s CO2 tax and the likely implementation of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme for shipping from 2023.

In the maritime sector, looming CII and EEXI regulations are set to enter into force next year that will shift the market landscape and give an advantage to proactive players able to progressively cut their emissions in line with these new carbon-intensity requirements.

Scenario planning

The CORE solution helps companies to underpin a culture driving emission reductions and to turn carbon intensity from an operational metric into boardroom-level insight on company and market decarbonisation efforts.

CORE interprets CII and CII equivalents as a score related to the emissions-saving goals for 2030 compared with 2008 as a baseline – or the ‘coreScore’ – that effectively gives industry stakeholders a comparative ranking of different companies’ efforts to reduce their emissions.

The software also makes it possible to plan for various emissions reduction initiatives for the fleet – such as installation of hybrid battery power, sails or use of biofuels – as well as assess their emissions impact, estimated cost and return on capital to enable scenario planning for optimal investments.

In addition, CORE offers a library of measures to determine current and future emission trajectories for different vessels that can be shared with other shipowners to improve the industry’s overall performance.

‘Ticket to trade’

Visibility of emissions data will be “a ticket to trade” in future as sustainability becomes a key business metric for stakeholders across the maritime value chain, according to Simen Sanna, chief executive of Yxney Maritime that is being rebranded as VPS Decarbonisation

“It is important to realise that carbon-intensity requirements will become stricter over time so companies cannot remain static and still achieve compliance. CORE is therefore a dynamic tool that enables emissions targets to be adjusted and achieved in line with regulations,” he said. 

As well as regulatory demands, there is increasing market pressure for green change from shipping stakeholders as emissions performance becomes a key criterion for charter awards from cargo owners and access to green finance from banks.

Yxney Maritime’s chief commercial officer Sindre Bornstein believes CII and EEXI represent a “digital scrubber moment” with major implications for all actors in the maritime industry. 

“These regulations are commercial drivers that are changing market behaviour,” he said.

“Companies that do not exercise responsibility in monitoring emissions and planning to meet carbon intensity targets could be left with poor charters or even stranded assets. The key is vessel data visualisation and availability that can only be achieved with a digital tool such as CORE.”

“CORE is a tool to achieve real change in ship emissions by closing the gap between where a company is now and where it wants to go in the future,” Bornstein added. 

Industry interaction

Solstad Offshore has been a first-mover by collaborating with Yxney Maritime to develop new digital solutions as part of the Maress Sustainability Partnership (MSP). The MSP is a community of industry change agents openly discussing how collaboration and smart use of data can shift the needle in meeting sustainability goals. This was the setting in which the idea of CORE first came to life and found industrial anchoring.

“With 80 vessels operating worldwide, we needed an effective digital tool to handle high data volumes and complexity to track emissions across our fleet and determine the initiatives we need to achieve to meet our goal to cut emissions by 50% within 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050,” said Solstad Offshore’s chief sustainability officer Tor Inge Dale.

“CORE enables us to plot a course and plan ahead for emissions reduction as we take the lead on this digital journey together with key technology suppliers such as Yxney Maritime.”

Siem Offshore’s ESG Director Jon August Houge said: “The coreScore provides a reliable metric to assess the integrity and trustworthiness of our emissions performance.”

The collaborative approach adopted by Yxney Maritime also extends to the CORE software that is designed for interaction with multiple users and data-sharing across different stakeholder groups through a user-friendly visual interface.

Photo credit: VPS and Solstad Offshore
Published: 8 September 2022