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An evidence based assessment of key barriers to Onboard Carbon Capture and Storage, and its potential for maritime decarbonisation.
As shipyard orderbooks are full of fossil-powered vessels, and uncertainty remains about the speed of green fuels uptake, the shipping industry is also looking at a wide range of alternative solutions. Onboard Carbon Capture is increasingly hailed as a catch-all solution to reduce emissions from fossil-fueled ships, but there are concerns that industry could prioritise short-term investment in this technology over the long-term investments needed in clean fuel.
T&E commissioned Pre-Scouter to provide an overview of the existing onboard carbon capture and storage (OCCS) project landscape. The aim is to develop a data-based assessment of the technologies’ realistic potential to contribute to maritime decarbonisation — and what would be necessary to deploy it at scale.
The resulting report shows that capturing CO2 onboard is technically feasible. However, real-world results outside of narrowly defined pilot projects depend on practical ship constraints: the extra energy required to run the system, the space and weight it takes up, and how reliably it can operate across normal voyages and maintenance cycles.
Beyond its ship-side application, OCCS scalability is likely to be decided downstream. Captured CO2 only becomes creditable if it can be measured, stored, offloaded, and transferred under an auditable chain of custody to a verified permanent sink — few of which are available today. This makes offloading infrastructure, storage access, and consistent MRV rules the gating factors for deployment beyond pilots.
More surprisingly, significant data gaps as to the technical performance, cost, and operational constraint under real life conditions cast doubt on sometimes highly ambitious claims as to OCCS’ role as a key transitional technology.
Download Report.
Article from T&E.
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