Tag Archives: Energy efficiency

Carnival Corporation is upgrading its ships’ engines and technical systems to improve energy efficiency

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The “service power packages” upgrades will include ongoing installations throughout 2023 on ships belonging to the company’s nine brands – Carnival Cruise Line, Princess Cruises, Holland America Line, Seabourn, P&O Australia, Costa Cruises, Aida Cruises, P&O Cruises and Cunard.

Developed over the last six years and tailored to each vessel, upgrades to save energy include investments in variable speed drives and on-demand automation and controls, cooling enhancements, energy-saving LED lighting and more efficient heating and ventilation systems.

Carnival estimates the programme will deliver an average of 5-10% fuel savings per ship and is expected to reduce fleet-wide greenhouse gas emissions by more than 500,000 metric tons each year.

The upgrades will also result in around $150 million in fuel cost savings per year.

Carnival’s chief maritime officer Bill Burke said: “Based on our improved fleet composition, including adding six industry-leading LNG-powered ships, and our previous investments to increase efficiency and reduce emissions, our absolute carbon emissions peaked in 2011 despite significant capacity growth over the past decade.”

“These tailored service power packages further build on those efforts as part of our comprehensive approach to sustainability.”

The fleet-wide enhancements are part of Carnival’s energy efficiency investment programme. The company has committed to reducing carbon emission intensity by 20% from its 2019 baseline by 2030, supporting its efforts to achieve net carbon-neutral ship operations by 2050.

With ships, green begets green

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By Tom Stieghorst

It’s logical to think that the EPA bid to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from commercial jets will raise costs for airlines and their customers. That’s the usual side-effect of more regulation.In the long run it may be true. But in the short run, judging from what’s happened in the cruise industry, it may not be.

Tom Stieghorst
Tom Stieghorst

Efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions from ships at the International Maritime Organization have largely focused on making vessels more fuel-efficient. Less consumption of fuel equates to fewer greenhouse gases.

True, cruise companies have had to invest in new ways of saving energy, from hull coatings to LED and compact florescent lighting. Energy efficiency has also become a bigger factor in itinerary planning and ship speeds.

But the end result has been a reduction in fuel expense that companies can use to pad profits, invest in new ships and technologies or even hold the line on price increases.

To take one example, Carnival Corp. last fall said it had saved at least $2.5 billion in fuel costs over the last seven years as a result of a fleet fuel conservation program that has reduced carbon emissions by 12 billion kilograms over the same time frame.

In part, the program is an effort to comply with IMO rules on energy-efficient ship design and IMO’s development of a template for energy-efficient ship operations – amendments to the MARPOL convention that became effective in 2013.

Cutting fuel consumption is likely to be the main approach to reducing marine greenhouse gases for years to come.
Unlike sulfur dioxide emissions, which several cruise lines are reducing through the use of catalytic scrubbers in the exhaust stream, greenhouse gasses aren’t currently practical to scrub.

The main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is hard to separate from other gases for treatment. And scrubbing by current methods is energy-intensive and costly. It adds between 50% and 84% to the cost of electricity produced by a power plant compared to plants that don’t have carbon capture technology, according to a U.S. Department of Energy study.

So reducing greenhouse gases from cruise ships may not only be sound for the environment but at the same time may be a good development for the bottom line. It’s always nice when doing right and doing well coincide.