?Hoteling?California

æHotelingÆCalifornia Ports, carriers have programs for vessels to receive shore power when they check into terminals.

By Chris Dupin

   Call it cold ironing, shore power, alternative marine power ' by any other name the practice smells as sweet to governments and environmentalists trying to reduce pollution and improve health in communities living cheek by jowl with marine terminals.
   All three terms are used to describe the practice of ships switching off the auxiliary engines they normally use to generate power when tied up, and instead using electricity generated at on-shore power plants.
   California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations will impose widespread use of shore power by ships when they are berthed, or 'hoteling,' by 2014.
   Through its 'at-berth oceangoing vessels regulation,' CARB requires containerships, refrigerated cargo vessels and cruise ships to halve pollution by 2014 when tied up at a half-dozen California ports ' Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, San Francisco, Port Hueneme and San Diego.
   CARB said those types of ships account for about 80 percent of all emissions created when ships are hoteling in California.
   Most carriers have elected to meet the CARB requirement through the use of shore power. Some, notably Maersk Line, are trying to meet the requirements, at least initially, using other environmental technologies.
   Some California ports are also requiring cargo terminals, as they renew their leases, to electrify all their berths.
   While the California rules are the most sweeping, cold ironing is also being used elsewhere. For example, the Port of Tacoma expected to complete a project in September with Totem Ocean Trailer Express (TOTE) that enables the carrier to plug in its Orca-class roll-on/roll-off ships that operate in a twice-weekly service to Anchorage, Alaska.
   Phil Morrell, vice president for marine and terminal operations at TOTE, said the project is economically and environmentally compelling.
   Each of the two ships in the service, the Midnight Sun and North Star, will be able to turn off diesel electric generators that power operations, such as ventilation equipment and ramps, during the eight hours they spend in port. That reduces use and maintenance, and also allows the company to take advantage of inexpensive power generated in the Pacific Northwest. It's also a health benefit for TOTE crew, longshoremen and others who work or live near the port.
   Shore power, which has long been used on some Navy ships that may spend weeks or months docked, is becoming more common on cargo and cruise ships. The Military Sealift Command, for example, has set a goal for its fleet to eventually be connected to ship-to-shore power 40 percent of the time, which would save roughly 30 percent to 50 percent of U.S. port fuel costs.
   The technology is also used by cruise operators such as Princess and Holland America at terminals in Seattle; Juneau, Alaska; and Vancouver, British Columbia.
   In Seattle, about two-thirds of the ships calling at its Smith Cove cruise terminal cold iron. (The port also subsidizes the cost of low-sulfur fuel for cruise and cargo ships when they are moving to and from berths or if they are not able to plug in at the cruise terminal.)
   In August, the Port of New York and New Jersey authorized a $15 million project to install landside electrical infrastructure needed for cruise ships calling on the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal to cold iron.
   In a Clean Air Strategy adopted a year ago, New York port planners listed shore power capability at the Manhattan Cruise Terminal and new terminals as longer term actions for further consideration in next five years.
   While cruise ships are sometimes in ports for only a few hours, as opposed to days for a large containership, they are considered good candidates for cold ironing because they consume such huge quantities of power.

Terminals. Preparing ships to cold iron is not a one-size-fits-all exercise, said Brian Constable, chief operating officer for APL.
   'The first thing to understand is that every vessel class is different. What applies on one class of ships may not be feasible on another class of ships on a retrofit basis,' Constable said. 'Retrofits are the hardest things to do and the most expensive.
   'The same applies to terminals. There is no one terminal that is a model for another. Each one must be investigated, and the spread in costs can be very substantial on both vessels and terminals,' he said.
   For example, APL has done some initial looking at its Seattle terminal, and the cost to put in an electrical substation there is $16 million, nearly four times what it's spent on its Oakland terminal.
   'There are some big and horrible numbers and APL does not own the terminals, but has a rental agreement,' he noted. 'This has been one of the problems with the California rules ' they are mandating that the terminal operator is responsible for doing the terminal and the ship owner is responsible for doing the ships.'
   Los Angeles has seven container terminals and a cruise terminal, and the port believes all, including the Maersk facility, will eventually need shore power facilities.
   The port has electrified two berths at its cruise terminal at a cost of $15 million. And three berths at the terminal are already electrified, including those used by Evergreen, Yusen Terminals Inc., and China Shipping, which has been using shore power at its terminal in Los Angeles since 2004.
   Readying MOL's TraPac subsidiary for shore power was part of a long-term lease deal signed with Los Angeles last year.
   Evergreen has had the ability to cold iron its S- and V-type ships for a number of years, but a spokeswoman said those vessels are not being used in the U.S. trades.
   NYK said it has been cold ironing in Los Angeles since 2007, but it is not yet using alternate marine power in other ports.
   'We are studying the possibilities and we have received approaches from some ports interested in cold ironing,' said Suguru Uchida, a spokesman at the company's Tokyo office. 'We are willing to cooperate with them and implement the system further.'
   The Port of Shanghai has conducted cold ironing studies and recently announced an agreement with China Shipping to use moveable shore power units for vessels to reduce air pollution.
   'With the rapid development of the port of Shanghai, more than 170 big vessels call at the port on a daily average, not to mentioned numerous small ones, which are all powered by engines burning diesels and emit waste gas,' the port said. The port said the technology would reduce pollution and annually save the equivalent of energy generated by burning 300,000 tons of coal.
   APL has converted five C-11 vessels it owns to enable them to use shore power.
   'If you own the ship and you have to make a $2 million investment in the ship to cold iron, that's one thing. But if you were actually time chartering a vessel and you have to spend $2 million of your money so that a time chartered vessel can do the same thing, it presents many, many headaches,' Constable said.
   Converting ships so they can use shore power may affect how a company deploys vessels, he said.
   'One thing you have to do is determine whether there is any likelihood that the vessels might be moved out of the transpacific service in the future and not call California. That might happen if the vessels were too small,' he explained. 'If you had 5,000-TEU ships and the ship size needed to grow to 8,000 TEU in the near future, you would not want to spend $2 million per ship. Our team could clearly define that the C-11 would be in the transpacific trade for the foreseeable future so the decision was made to go ahead and retrofit them.'
   To enable its ships to cold iron, APL has installed a transformer on each ship that steps down 6,600-volt shore-side power to the 480-volt power used aboard ships. It has also created room-size enclosures that house the receptacles where shore power cables are connected, and installed more than 8,000 meters of cables that run from the receptacles through the transformer and into the vessel's electrical control panel.
   Other companies are locating transformers and cable handling systems in containers on the deck of the ship so that if a ship is taken out of a loop calling California, the equipment could be transferred to another vessel.
   Constable said APL has looked how it will cold iron vessels in Los Angeles.
   'Once you have made a commitment to cold iron a vessel, it behooves you to turnaround and maximize the ability to cold iron that vessel at every port call, because it saves a lot of operating hours on the generators which will reduce maintenance.'
   While electrical power is more expensive than burning fuel right now, 'that could change if the price of fuel goes sky high the way we have seen it rocket in the past,' he said.
   One of the challenges steamship lines and terminals face as they build shore power installations is finding a stable and secure supply of power.
   'That is where some of these significant costs come in,' Constable said. 'To put in the substations that can supposedly take electrical power that is needed for the number of berths and respective loads on them.'
   At the Port of Long Beach, 'K' Line became the first container line to use shore power in the port in 2008. Matson Navigation Co., which calls at Pier C, is expected to begin plugging in its first vessels this fall.
   Both Matson's joint terminal venture with SSA Marine and 'K' Line's International Transportation Service terminal subsidiary, signed 'green leases' with the Port of Long Beach in May 2006.
   Lisa Swanson, director of environmental affairs at Matson, explained the lease required the carrier to either give its vessels cold ironing capability or use different technology that would result in 'substantially equivalent' pollution reduction.
   'We originally looked more seriously at the equivalency option and were hoping that with a combination of low-sulfur fuels and selective catalytic reduction we would not have to do cold ironing,' Swanson explained. 'We initially had concerns, and perhaps they are still valid, that this technology (cold ironing) can only be used where the shore-side infrastructure is available, and so we felt if we could do something more on the ship, then we would have the ability to reduce emissions at all the ports,' she said.
   'But when you compare exhaust treatment technology to completely shutting down your engines, it is very hard to achieve that equivalency for a range of air pollutants. We are concerned about particulate matter, we are concerned about NOx and SOx (nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides). It is hard to get all those parameters.'
   In the Port of Long Beach, spokesman John Pope said diesel particulate emissions were cut in half from 2005 to 2009, in part because of the Long Beach and Los Angeles clean truck programs, the requirement by vessels to burn low-sulfur fuel when near shore in California, and incentives in the form of lower terminal fees for vessels that slow down as they approach and depart their port.
   As a result of the success in fighting truck pollution, the portion of pollution contributed by ships has jumped from about 50 percent to 65 percent. Pope said the hope is that most of that can be eliminated using shore power.
   'We have addressed to a large extent in-transit ships ' now we have to deal with the ships at berth, and shore power is the technology we have today and that is why we have chosen to pursue it,' he said.
   Mike Waugh, fuels program branch chief at CARB, said the six California ports last year had to submit plans on how they would implement the state's shore power regulation.
   'At this point we are pretty happy with the way things are going,' Waugh said. All terminals said they would be able to install shore power capability on schedule, and terminal operators are required to interact with carriers as well.
   CARB's cost estimate for implementing the shore power regulation in California is about $1.8 billion through 2020, with about two-thirds of the cost coming from work on ships and one-third from shore-side infrastructure.

Maersk. Companies, like Matson, are choosing to meet CARB requirements under an option that requires them by 2014 to generate power ashore for half the ships they have visiting the state, and reduce the total engine power used for auxiliary power when tied up by half. Those targets ramp up to 80 percent by 2020.
   But Maersk is taking a different approach, using a CARB option that allowed it to begin immediately using other technologies instead of or in addition to shore power to reduce emissions. Companies using this option had to cut at-berth emissions 10 percent this year, 25 percent in 2012, 50 percent in 2014 and 80 percent in 2020.
   'We feel that typically reductions that travel with the vessel are a more effective investment in terms of reducing air emissions,' said Lee Kindberg, director for the environment in North America at Maersk Line.
   Changes such as switching to low-sulfur fuel and improving fuel efficiency can be implemented more rapidly than cold ironing, she said, and have the effect of reducing pollution, including greenhouse gases, over a wider area.
   For example, Maersk has reduced fuel use per TEU by 20 percent since 2002, and switched to low-sulfur fuel when approaching California ports in 2006, steps that she said can reduce sulfur oxides by 95 percent and particulate matter by 86 percent.
   Going forward, Maersk plans to look at technology such as selective catalytic reduction (which she said is similar to automotive catalytic converters) or sliding valves to reduce nitrogen oxides.
   Maersk doesn't know if it will be able to meet the CARB 80 percent reduction requirement with those technologies by 2020. But Kindberg said cold ironing is a technology it could use in the future, if needed.
   Maersk voluntarily began using low-sulfur fuel in 2006 when it was 24 miles from the port. The state has since mandated its use, though requiring ships to begin using low-sulfur fuel when they are within 24 miles of the coast. That change actually means that because of geography, Channel Islands and bombing ranges, ships may need to steam 100 miles using low-sulfur fuel.
   Sulfur provides some lubrication to engines, but Kindberg said after 1,600 vessel calls using low-sulfur fuel to move to and from Los Angeles and Long Beach, Maersk has not found engines damaged.
   But APL's Constable, an engineer who takes a hands-on approach to his fleet, said the use of low-sulfur fuel still gives him 'some heartburn' because of worries about engine damage.

Costs, Funding. APL and TOTE received grants to assist with their projects.
   TOTE had already spent about $1 million on the project when it was put on the back burner because of the economic downturn. But it was resurrected when federal stimulus dollars became available and port of Tacoma secured nearly $1.49 million from the U.S. government, which was matched by a further $280,000 from TOTE.
   APL received grants from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, $2.8 million to electrify berths at its Oakland terminal, and $2 million to equip the first three containerships for cold ironing ' this in recognition that it is pioneering the clean air effort, planning to plug in early 2011 instead of merely complying with the 2014 deadline imposed by CARB.
   But Oakland's port has complained CARB is not supplying enough money to support cold ironing. The port, which estimated total cost of landside infrastructure at $114 million, requested $38 million from the agency. However, CARB's staff made a preliminary recommendation to provide $20 million to Oakland, plus $3.9 million if it could raise additional funds.
   Victor Uno, president of the Oakland Board of Port Commissioners, told CARB chair Mary Nichols in a June 7 letter that he found the recommendation 'shocking,' and appears 'to indicate that the health of Northern California residents generally and West Oakland residents is not one of CARB's highest priorities.'
   The board 'must hold up its end of the public trust by dedicating the requested $38 million towards shore power at our port,' Uno said.
   Pope of Long Beach said the port expects to spend about $180 million building shore-side infrastructure for vessels to cold iron, and will recover the expense through leases.
   Bulk ships and tankers are exempt from CARB regulation because many of those ships visit the same port infrequently. But in 2009 BP voluntarily added shore power capability to its Long Beach terminal, and retrofitted two tankers that shuttle Alaska crude oil to the terminal.
   Grant Chin of CARB explained most tankers use steam turbines power pumps to offload fuel. But BP tankers are diesel electric vessels like the TOTE ships, and so it is very cost effective to equip them for cold ironing and beneficial because they consume so much power when offloading.

Standards. Considerable effort has been made over the past four years by international organizations to create uniform standards so ships equipped to do cold ironing are able to call other terminals that have shore power facilities, said Eric Caris, assistant marketing director at the Port of Los Angeles.
   Caris was the convenor of the working group that developed the standard at the International Standards Organization. The working group has 25 persons from classification societies, component manufacturers, and vessel operators from various segments of the shipping industry. The International Maritime Organization is recognizing that group, which has joined similar groups such as the International Electrotechnical Commission and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
   Very large cruise and containerships will be able to use the 6,600-volt, shore-side power directly, after they have transformers installed on board to step power down. Transformers are placed on ships rather than most terminals because lack of space and there would have to be nine cables between the terminal and a transformer located ashore.