Co2 Emissions Archives

Addressing Challenges in Global Logistics with Technology

Posted on 24 July, 202431 July, 2025 by David Priestman

Over the last four to five years, we have experienced disrupted logistics — broadly defined here as the interruption or complete breakdown of the supply chain functions at one or multiple levels, writes Buddharatn Ratawal, Senior Manager for Strategic Business Development for the DELMIA brand at Dassault Systèmes.

Going back 14 years ago, the logistics industry dramatically reduced capital expenditure in 2008 when the great recession hit. Most of the companies never really resumed the pre-recession rate of expenditure growth. In fact, the outperforming logistics vendors today (based on profitability and revenue growth metrics) are the ones that were extra cautious on capital expenditure in the years following the recession.

The industry had a very clear objective for the next decade:

· Keep costs low

· Stay lean

· Remain efficient Due to this slow and steady approach, the logistics industry was able to keep margins stable even when it faced overcapacity in 2016—which is interesting to note as today, challenges revolve around container shortage and port congestions.

When COVID hit in early 2020, the slow and steady approach seemed right once more in hindsight. However, not long after, consumer spending behaviour changed significantly.

Shift in consumption behaviour and demand asymmetry

When COVID hit, there was a huge shift in consumption behaviour. In the short term, the expenditure on both goods and services saw a sharp decline. However, the expenditure on goods resumed to the pre-pandemic level within just a few months. Interestingly, it wasn’t until mid-2021 that the expenditure on services recovered on the same level.

This trend continues even today. There is a clear shift from spending on hotels and recreational services to spending on furniture, home equipment, footwear, etc. This shift is more prominent in North America as they have typically, bigger houses and therefore, more scope for concepts such as a home gym and home office. This meant a huge movement of goods from East Asia to Western Europe and America, creating an asymmetry in demand as well as freight rates.

Increasing cost and lack of resources

Years after the start of the pandemic, ocean freight rates still remain high and reached an all-time high towards the end of 2021. Similar behaviour was seen across road transport and air cargo. Although transport cost across all modes have been trending downwards for the last few months, it merely represents a shift in bottleneck from containers and transport vehicles to port handling and driver capacity.

The increasing number of incoming vessels at US coasts especially in the east has caused a huge increase in the waiting times at the ports. A similar situation exists in Northwestern Europe and there are multiple reasons for it:

· Lack of workers at the port due to strikes

· Declining number of truck drivers

· Lack of trucks and rail infrastructure to handle incoming load

The labour shortage is reaching crisis levels and is affecting large logistics companies that are cutting their financial outlook, citing hiring difficulties. In March 2022, the United States had a record-high 8.1 million vacant job openings. According to the Worker Shortage Index, there are roughly only half as many workers for every job vacancy as the average over the last 20 years, and the numbers are on a downward trajectory.

Challenges in global logistics

To overcome a wave of disruption, several measures need to be taken. They must be carried out with four broad stakeholders and objectives in mind. In no particular order, they are:

1. Profitability for shareholders For operations-heavy industries such as logistics, most cost saving lies in ‘doing it right the first time’. The best way to achieve this is to have a system that allows organizations to create the virtual twin, which predicts the future in the most realistic manner possible.

2. Satisfaction for customers Capabilities that ensure continued customer satisfaction are the ability to:

· Ensure capacity for the most profitable customers and products

· Calculate demand and supply for each stage of the production process and optimize daily

· Take into account all the factors that influence your capacity

· Quote dates that optimize profitability, throughput and customer satisfaction

3. Work-life balance for employees An integrated approach to logistics planning gives complete visibility of all assets and people to make the best use of drivers and vehicles in an optimized way.

4. Sustainability for the Environment A planning and optimization solution enables companies to include CO2 emissions as a planning KPI and not just a reporting metric.

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Reducing Pollutant Emissions in Shipping

Posted on 26 April, 2024 by Keith McKinley

Reducing pollutant emissions in the shipping industry can be achieved by using clean, alternative fuels like liquid ammonia, which requires fail-safe and hermetically tight pumps, writes Thomas Bökenbrink, Lead Product Manager Pumps at LEWA.

In total, around 11 billion tons of freight were transported by sea worldwide in 2021 – which corresponds to almost 90 percent of all trade goods. Producing more than 1 million tons of greenhouse gases, the shipping industry causes around 3 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions per year. And there are other pollutants, such as sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds and ozone-depleting substances (ODS). In coastal areas defined by the MARPOL Convention as Emission Control Areas (ECAs), these pollutants are subject to increasingly stringent limits. Ammonia (NH3) is currently coming to the fore in the search for clean alternative fuels to the heavy fuel oil that has been predominantly used to date. Unlike LPG and LNG, it does not emit any CO2 during combustion. However, the gas is both toxic to humans and animals as well as highly harmful to the environment. The technology employed in order to use liquid ammonia as a fuel must therefore be hermetically tight and guarantee maximum operational safety. LEWA’s high-pressure diaphragm pumps meet these requirements. Their standard safety mechanisms make them suitable for hazardous, toxic and environmentally harmful fluids such as NH3, even under extreme operating conditions.

In 2018 alone, the shipping industry caused a total of 1,076 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, including 1,056 million tons of CO2. Compared to 2008, this represents an increase of around 90 percent. If the industry does not change, levels are expected to rise to up to 130 percent of those from 2008 over the next 25 years. To improve these forecasts, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) developed a greenhouse gas strategy in 2018 that aims to reduce the shipping industry’s carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and by a total of 70 percent by 2050. In addition to the ECAs defined in the MARPOL agreement, which are to be further expanded in the future, the Energy Efficiency Design Index for New Ships (EEDI) and the Ship Energy Efficiency Management Plan (SEEMP) regulate the energy efficiency and CO2 emissions of newly built ships. Older models with more than 400 GT, on the other hand, have had to comply with the new regulations of the Energy Efficiency Design Index for Existing Ships (EEXI) since 2023.

Liquid ammonia as a sustainable marine fuel

With the aim of reducing emissions and fuel consumption while increasing performance and ensuring cost-efficient operation, dual-fuel variants of two-stroke marine diesel engines have been conquering the market for several years now. They enable a high degree of flexibility with regard to the fuels used, from pure marine diesel or heavy fuel oil operation to gas operation. On the gas side, LNG and LPG (propane/butane), which are particularly suitable for liquefied gas tankers, have mainly been used to date. However, these are fossil gases, and while they release fewer pollutants overall during combustion, they still release a considerable amount of CO2. LNG also consists predominantly of methane (CH4), which is around 25 times more harmful to the climate than CO2 and, in two-stroke marine diesel engines, small amounts inevitably escape – a phenomenon called methane slip. For this reason, LNG and LPG are merely bridging technologies on the way to completely carbon-free ship propulsion.

First used as an alternative fuel in 1943 due to a diesel shortage, ammonia (NH3) does not emit particulate matter, nitrogen oxides or CO2 during combustion and has no ozone depletion potential. Until now, it has been obtained from nitrogen (N2) and hydrogen (H2) using the Haber-Bosch process, which requires a great deal of energy. The production of hydrogen is particularly critical from an environmental point of view, as H2 has so far been split off from fossil methane gas. However, with the development of processes for the sustainable production of H2 via electrolysis using renewable energies on an industrial scale, NH3 is now becoming an attractive fuel for clean and sustainable ship propulsion systems. This also provides a positive answer to the important well-to-wake (WTW) question: When considering new fuels, it is crucial to take into account not only the combustion process in the ship’s engine, but also the entire balance of fuel production. Thanks to the new processes, NH3 can also be an attractive option.

At the end of 2023, the world’s first ammonia project for bulk carriers was launched. In a four-party agreement, the Belgian bulk carrier operator CMB.TECH appointed the engine manufacturer WinGD as well as CSSC Qingdao Beihai Shipbuilding (QBS) and CSSC Engine Co (CSE) to produce the first eight 210,000 DWT bulk carriers powered by NH3. These are to be delivered over the next three years.

Hermetically tight pump technology in NH3 dual-fuel drives

Engine manufacturer MAN Energy Solutions also anticipates a rapid increase in the fuel to around 40 percent of the total fuel mix for dual-fuel two-stroke engines by 2030. Given these promising forecasts, it is hardly surprising that the order for the first ammonia cargo ships has already been placed, even though the marine engines for this application are still under development. Compared to LPG or LNG, NH3 poses its own challenges as a fuel: Even in very small quantities, the odorous gas is highly toxic to humans and animals, and it reacts with other air pollutants to form unwanted particulate matter in the atmosphere.

Fail-safe, hermetically tight pump technology is therefore required to move NH3 safely and reliably within the ship and inject it precisely into the engine. The challenge: Conventional plunger pumps, which are usually used for these kinds of high-pressure applications, have a natural leakage at the plunger seal due to their design. For the fuel gas supply systems (FGSS) in dual-fuel ship propulsion systems with NH3, only high-pressure diaphragm pumps designed without dynamic seals can therefore be considered. This creates a hermetically tight working chamber that rules out the possibility of emissions.

Triplex diaphragm pumps for FGSS

Thanks to their robust design with maximum operational reliability, the low-pulsation LEWA triplex diaphragm pumps have so far proven themselves as fuel pumps in FGSS, primarily for LPG – but nothing stands in the way of their use with NH3. The required pressures of approx. 85 bar can be realized very easily with LEWA triplex diaphragm pumps. For the pump heads of the M900 series, which have been proven in the field for many years, this value is even in the lower range of the possible performance spectrum, which extends up to 500 bar. Particles or oil residues in the fuel can also be conveyed without any problems. As the diaphragm pumps are dry-run safe to an unlimited degree, costly failures cannot occur even if other faults occur in the FGSS. In addition, the systems are designed in such a way that they can be maintained and repaired by the crew directly on board using simple means.

The patented sandwich diaphragm with integrated monitoring system ensures that the LEWA triplex diaphragm pumps remain hermetically tight even if the diaphragm is damaged. This guarantees that no dangerous NH3 can escape, even under extreme operating conditions. Integrated overpressure protection and optional pump monitoring by LEWA Smart Monitoring supplement the high standards of operational safety. Intelligent monitoring systems will generally become more relevant in the shipping industry over the next few years, as digitalization is also being advanced in this field. Often, newly built freighters are already being made “smarter”. As NH3 is a clean and sustainable marine fuel in the long term, corresponding drives could also play a role in the development of autonomous smart ships in the coming decades.

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Quantifying Supply Chain Co2 Emissions

Posted on 30 November, 2023 by Keith McKinley

COP28, which begins today, will see global business leaders take stock of progress since the 2015 Paris Agreement, emphasising the need for action to drive forward net-zero goals. Efficio, a global procurement and supply chain consultancy, is working with business leaders to do just that – turning attention to the supply chain to make the biggest impact on ESG. That’s because supply chain emissions typically make up 40-80% of an organization’s total carbon emissions – sometimes even reaching over 90%.

According to Efficio research, 73% of business leaders (77% of C-suite) cite minimising or eradicating environmental impacts as a key priority for the next two years – but a clear line of sight surrounding ESG factors remains a barrier to success. Data needed to quantify carbon emissions within the supply chain can span multiple systems and suppliers. This can be difficult to gather, let alone analyse for future decision-making.

In response to this challenge, Efficio is working with businesses to implement the CarbonCube®, a tool that lets procurement teams efficiently measure and monitor supply chain emissions, set targets, and monitor supplier performance.

Today, CPOs from Kantar, a global data, insights and consulting company, and Permanent TSB (PTSB), a provider of personal financial services in Ireland, are among some of the organisations using the technology to deliver their sustainability strategies. Using the CarbonCube®, PTSB has been able to leverage spend data to identify priority categories with high greenhouse emissions, gain visibility over sustainability commitments made by its supply base, and support the business’s overall sustainability strategy through target assessment and supplier outreach.

Rachel Hollywood, Procurement ESG Manager at PTSB recently commented: “Efficio’s CarbonCube® enabled us to set a strong and realistic emission baseline from which to prepare carbon reduction initiatives, supporting the bank’s strategic agenda for its 2024 SBTi submission and fostering a culture of sustainability and environmental awareness throughout our value chain – from our employees through to our supply base.”

Meanwhile, Kantar is using the CarbonCube® to accelerate its carbon reduction strategy. In a recent interview, Steve Day, Chief Procurement Officer at Kantar, acknowledged that the supply chain is representative of a very significant part of any business’s carbon footprint. He sees this as an opportunity for procurement to own the topic and highlight the value the function can bring to the wider business beyond the traditional back-office function.

However, before this is possible, Day emphasised that work needs to be done, commenting: “I see a lot of people inflating their carbon strategies and thinking about net neutrality, but in truth, you must first get to a point where you can start to measure what scope three looks like. This is where the CarbonCube® comes into play – it has helped us accelerate our thinking and begin richer conversations around what categories of spending to focus on and what our category strategies are going to be.”

Commenting on the two projects, Edward Cox, Director and Sustainable Procurement Practice Lead at Efficio, concluded: “These projects are real-world examples of how procurement and supply chain teams can take the lead in driving sustainability impacts, and how trusted data sources can be used to simplify processes like quantifying carbon emissions.

“Supply chains are most organisations’ largest source of emissions, and procurement can and should be the engine for change. Procurement needs to be accountable for a growing set of metrics that have ESG at their core. Buying the right things from the right suppliers is more important than ever.”