THE SCIPPER PROJECT CONCEPT

Solutions for meeting emission standards

The new emission standards for ships can be achieved implementing the following solutions:

  • Low sulfur fuel and NOx aftertreatment
  • Heavy fuel and both NOx and SOx aftertreatment
  • LNG
  • Other fuels, like methanol, electrification, etc.

Research Question

But how will authorities make sure that correct fuel or proper aftertreatment are being used? The SCIPPER Project seeks to answer this major question adressing the overall need for:

  • Compliance check of environmental regulations.
  • More evidence on monitoring possibilities for low sulphur levels, new pollutants, as well as implications of non-compliant ships to air pollution

SCIPPER Main objectives

  • To provide evidence on the performance and capacity of different techniques for shipping emissions monitoring and regulations’ enforcement
  • To assess the impacts of shipping emissions on air quality, under different regulatory enforcement scenarios

SCIPPER objectives are achieved in five real-world experimental campaigns involving actual vessels and the largest ports in the EU. A mirror activity in Asia has been scheduled to validate results obtained in the EU.

Concept

In order to address the many and largely unexplored problems related to vessels emissions monitoring, SCIPPER aims at deploying state-of-art and next-generation measurement techniques to monitor emissions of vessels under their normal operation, such as on-board sensors, sniffers, optical remote techniques, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), satellite systems.

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Different measurement techniques will be deployed in five real-world campaigns over main shipping areas in EU and one mirror activity at the port of Hong Kong. Together with SOx and NOx, which are the current regulatory priority, techniques to characterise PM, including UFP and BC, will be deployed. Experimental information in the campaigns will be combined with advanced plume dispersion and chemical transport models (CTMs) to estimate current ship-induced air pollution and predict the impact of various degrees of compliance to major port areas in the EU.

The conceptual flow diagram of SCIPPER comprises three technical pillars:

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Pillar 1

In-parallel demonstration of the potential of several monitoring techniques over five EU and one Asian experimental campaigns. This is a necessary feasibility study to demonstrate sensitivity for low sulphur limits, monitoring of new pollutants and performance specificities of the various techniques.

Collecting several methods in each campaign, together with reference and scientific instruments, allows the comparative assessment of the different methods.

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Pillar 2

The collection of several techniques, sensors and instruments will provide new experimental information, including performance of the different techniques, pollutants concentration for emission factor production, plume characterisation, and air pollution in harbours, cities and shipping routes.

This also produces new science but is mostly necessary to fulfil the objectives of the project, i.e. to assess the monitoring potential of the different techniques.

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Pillar 3

The experimental information collected in Pillar 2 will be used to advance current AQ simulation models to allow for the assessment of shipping contribution to air pollution in port locations, urban areas and coastal regions.

Such models will be used to assess current contributions as well as to estimate future AQ impacts of shipping in a variety of regulatory and compliance scenarios.