FuelEU Maritime is big on assigning responsibility and punishing non-compliance but at the point where reality strikes, the reporting and verification requirements bearing on each party are not clearly enough understood.
For once, it's not the foundational shift of paying more to use fossil fuels and incentivising take up of green ones; it's how the industry actually manages the process.
The complexity of FuelEU Maritime has seen shipping companies in doubt about how to handle this new risk. As a result, we see ourselves being asked more and more often if we can develop forecasting tools, that can assist in developing a FuelEU strategy (and ETS before that).
As a solutions provider it's our role to come up with answers but this time these requests don't take into account the established distribution of workflows when talking about voyage management.
The baseline solution as we see it divides into three components: voyage management systems (VMS), voyage optimization systems and verification agencies, normally a class society. VMS provides the economics, pre-fixture intelligence and planning functionality. Voyage optimization systems operate post-fixture, with verification agencies providing third party assurance.
The interaction between these three systems is well established and has become more important than ever since the EU ETS landed the cost of emissions on the bottom line of the voyage.
Sitting back with crossed fingers and waiting for a single all-encompassing solution you can jump on, will probably lead to disappointment.
What should happen instead is that the vessel operator, VMS and VP providers need to come together and have a more open-minded discussion, with the verifier in the loop. Could they create a better solution to those of existing providers by collaborating?
Single solution providers will likewise always fall short in this situation because their business models are different. The value providers can be left separate but they can connect to a common data source to create accurate, verifiable results.
Make no mistake, FuelEU Maritime asks big questions. Some are hard to answer as they require an operator to predict how to optimise a single or multiple ships in a pool across a whole year. It might be possible to model your way out of this challenge but it is more efficient for VMS and VP providers to share responsibility and help the operator narrow down the variables.
It's not hard to envisage a scenario that provides the incentive for both providers to share data beyond the usual claims process. The parties to a voyage must agree on a data set to settle against with third party verification.
EU Fuel Maritime is unlike an IMO regulation that takes say, a fuel sample from one ship and finds it in or out of compliance. The need to balance performance across a whole fleet requires a strategy. We don't provide that strategy, our systems support customer decisions. Operators are at liberty to take the expensive but simple or the complicated but competitive approach.
We don't envisage the dawning of an age of widespread transparent data exchange but some sharing is essential. Enabling systems providers to do what they are hired for means utilising the same data. It need not be public but it requires a protocol for sharing with trading partners.
Maybe this is not so complex after all, simply that the solutions lie in two or three locations that can be joined together by data.
Fuel EU Maritime changes the industry's traditional resistance to sharing data. Managing compliance from a practical point of view will require this collaboration. If it is to adapt to the new shape of maritime regulation, shipping can't sail around it.
Source: By Christian Rae Holm, CEO, Coach Solutions