The Carbon War Room (CWR) has today launched a free-to-access, online ship operational efficiency portal that offers ship owners and operators access to transparent data to compare how efficiently an individual vessel has operated over the past year and against its peers.
BetterFleet, which is hosted on shippingefficiency.org is designed to allow anyone — shipowner, cargo-owner or others — to see an overview of a specific ship’s performance.
The tool is the result of a collaborative project between Carbon War Room, exactEarth, and University Maritime Advisory Service (UMAS) that was funded as part of the €1 million ($1.09 million) grant from Dutch Postcode Lottery, which CWR and Rocky Mountain Institute was awarded to expand their impact in the shipping industry.
Through shippingefficiency.org, the BetterFleet portal offers provides free-to-access efficiency data to support the shipping industry’s many different stakeholders, and particularly those who use it as part of their supply chain, to understand the comparative energy efficiency of different vessels and identify actions to reduce emissions and costs. It is based on AIS data and the best publicly available data processed through state-of-the-art models, similar to those used for the Third IMO GHG Study.
The portal currently includes a large portion of the tanker, bulk carrier and container ship fleets, and more vessel types and sizes will be added over time.
However, Carbon War Room are issuing the advisory notice that this tool is not intended to be better than, or replace the information shipowners obtain directly from their vessels. Rather, it is meant to be “the best data of its kind that is publicly available in order to enable comparison.”
It is designed to allow anyone — shipowner, cargo-owner or others — to see an overview of a specific ship’s performance. BetterFleet, and the models and data it is based on, will continue to improve and evolve over time to support the needs of the industry.
BetterFleet allows any registered user to search by ship name or IMO number to see the performance of that vessel over a 12-month period. It displays the following metrics and visuals to provide a holistic view of the ship’s operation:
• An “out of ten” score summarising the overall performance of the ship over the previous 12 months compared with ships of similar type and size.
• An overview of the magnitude and frequency of estimated operational efficiency variations for the individual vessel and for all the vessels of the same type and size, measured in grams of CO2 per tonne-mile of freight transported.
• A world map depicting the voyages of the vessel over the same time period.
Rickmers Shipmangement (Singapore) Pte Ltd trialled BetterFleet prior to launch, their vice president, Captain Kavil Madhu Nair commented: “Ships now operate in a world where effective decision-making is more vital than ever, affecting trading relationships, the environmental impact of transporting goods and the bottom lines of owner, operator and shipper alike. In this world, transparent and consistent information is becoming increasingly important, with access to operational efficiency data a key consideration for forward-looking organisations.
“By launching BetterFleet and making operational efficiency data available to the masses, shipowners and managers will be able to make the case for greater operational efficiency to charterers and shippers, who drive the demand and determine how vessels are run in most cases. It will also boost the commercial offering of efficient operators and managers by demonstrating they are able to work with their shippers to run ships as efficiently as possible.
“We see real potential for BetterFleet to help owners, managers and shippers to re-shape the market.”
BetterFleet builds on ShippingEfficiency.org’s existing tool, the GHG Emissions Rating, which launched in 2010 with partner RightShip. Today, 20% of all shipped tonnage is now transported on ships vetted for efficiency using the GHG Emissions Rating. The tools are very different. The GHG Emissions Rating provides information on how efficient a ship is originally designed to be, whereas the new BetterFleet tool shows how efficiently a ship has operated based on its technical specifications and how it is used over a specific period of time. Together these tools can help different aspects of the industry understand and contribute to total emissions reductions from shipping.
Betterfleet was officially unveiled at the World Ocean Council’s Sustainable Ocean Summit, which is being hosted in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
