We have for the past 13 years, regularly analysed the online carbon emissions calculators provided by the ocean carriers. And over the years, we have shown significant discrepancy between the results provided by these calculators. We did this exercise once again, focusing on Ocean Alliance, as all member carriers have publicly available carbon calculators. We specifically looked at shipping 1 TEU on Shanghai-Rotterdam.

In the case of CMA CGM, they include results for 3 of the 5 Ocean Alliance services, as the remaining 2 serve Rotterdam-Shanghai on the backhaul due to the routing sequence. Evergreen and OOCL provide a measure for all 5 services, with OOCL also including their non-alliance LLX service. COSCO only provides a single measurement, for their AEU3 service.

The emissions per service for 1 TEU is shown in Figure 1. The dramatic difference in emissions is quite evident here. Hypothetically, you could reduce emissions by 71%, by shifting from CMA CGM to OOCL. This is of course not true, as the cargo moves on the same underlying vessel, but it does reflect huge differences in methodology, notably that CMA CGM uses Well-to-Wake. If we keep CMA-CGM out of the comparison to avoid this specific issue and instead only benchmark OOCL with Evergreen, we get a hypothetical savings in carbon emissions of up to 42%. Again, this is simply not possible, as the service is the same.

This goes to show that it is wholly impossible for shippers to use the carriers’ carbon calculators, for any kind of meaningful comparative analysis. In their own right, some calculators might be methodologically sound. However, over the years, the carriers have begun diverting even more in their methodological choices, bringing us to a point, where it is now even less informative from a comparative standpoint than 13 years ago, when we first did this analysis.

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 All quotes can be attributed to: Alan Murphy, CEO, Sea-Intelligence.
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