A portal has been created by the European Maritime Safety Agency for ship operators to report annual CO2 emissions of their vessels.
The portal, under EMSA’s THETIS reporting system allows owners to inform European regulators about their emission monitoring plans and to submit verified annual emission data. These are both requirements under the EU CO monitoring Reporting and Verification of ship CO2 emissions that are currently in force and with deadlines about to impact shipping.
THETIS is the information system created by the European Union to help the region’s port state inspection regime.
The rules apply to all ships over 5,000 gt and sailing to, from and between European ports. Owners need to have a verified monitoring plan place by the end of this month. The plans need to be accredited by an approved Accreditation agency, and be submitted into the THETIS MRV portal.
Owners need to begin recording emissions related to voyages to form and between European ports from January 1 2018, and have these verified and reported by April of 2019. Submission of each vessel will then be annual after that, but also be replicated somewhat by similar IMO rules that come into play in 2019.
The European rules are part of the EU attempts to include maritime transport into its overall policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While the MRV rules themselves do not mandate any attempts to make reductions, there is the expected likelihood they will in the near future once two or three years of data has been accumulated.
In its statement EMSA said: “The move is expected to encourage the uptake of greenhouse gas emission-reduction measures within the maritime sector, as the emissions data will be made public and updated yearly. EMSA was tasked to develop a robust system for the monitoring and reporting of verified data on CO2 emissions, annual fuel consumption and other energy efficiency parameters by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Climate Action.
EMSA says its THETIS-MRV system allows companies to work together with accredited verifiers to prepare monitoring plans in a voluntary module and, importantly, to release emission reports and documents of compliance to the European Commission and relevant flag state authorities using the mandatory module.
“Using the information submitted, the European Commission will publish annual aggregated data per ship covering fuel consumption, CO2 emissions and average energy efficiency indicators, among others,” wrote EMSA.
This has been a cause of concern by some shipowners groups that see this as sensitive information. The IMO data collection system will not be publishing such data when it starts.
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