Maritime Routing Optimization And Technology Choice Of Emission Reduction Under Sulfur Emission Control Area

The concept of green and low-carbon is increasingly becoming the theme of world sustainable development.International Maritime Organization?IMO?and the Ministry of Transport of China have put forward the regulation of sulfur emission control zone and carried out strict sulfur emission control on ships sailing or berthed within the SECA.With the rapid development of economic globalization and transnational trade,marine transportation plays a very important role,taking up more than 90%of the world's trade volume^[1].The establishment of SECA has a significant impact on shipping worldwide.How to better deal with the constraints of the sulfur emission control area and to achieve the economic and environmentally friendly goals have become the common pursuit of all shipping companies.Firstly,this paper provides short-term optimization for shipping companies to cope with sulfur emission control.The most common measure to cope with sulfur emission control worldwide is:fuel switching technology,that is the use of heavy sulfur fuels with high sulfur content outside the SECA,and the use of low sulfur fuels within the SECA.This paper establishes the objective function of minimizing fuel consumption cost,and the related constraints of time and route selection,aiming at providing SECA avoidance strategy for shipping companies;that is to achieve the goal of short distance and low speed in SECA by sailing for longer distance and faster speed outside the SCEA.Therefore,this paper provides the route selection and speed optimization for the shipping companies to reduce the operational cost.Secondly,based on the long-term regulation of sulfur emission reduction,the selection of sulfur emission reduction technologies is studied.In the long term,there will be more SECAs in the world,higher price of low sulfur fuel oil and stricter regulations of sulfur emission.In order to cope with long-term sulfur emission control worldwide,ship companies usually adopt three technologies to reduce sulfur emissions:fuel switching technology,scrubber system and liquid natural gas.Since the technology of liquid natural gas is immature,we focus on the other two technologies.We know that the cost of new technology is rather high and the investment is irreversible,so this paper uses the life cycle cost method to calculate and compare the fixed investment cost and operational cost of the two sulfur emission reduction technologies,and provides management insights for the investment decision of the ship companies'sulfur emission reduction technology.Finally,with the sulfur emission control zone newly established in China in July,2018,the authenticity and validity of the two models can be verified through numerical analysis,and more management decisions can be provided.At the beginning,optimization of maritime routes and speed has been studied.Later,through the numerical experiment of various ports,the influence of port call density in the sulfur emission control area on the selection of sulfur emission reduction technology is analyzed.Meanwhile,the cost difference between the two technologies is compared based on various low sulfur fuel prices.Lastly,considering that more stringent sulfur emission control policies will be implemented in the future,the influence of two kinds of sulfur emission policies on technology choice under different marine gasoline prices is analyzed through numerical analysis experiments.We find that scrubber system becomes more preferable with the increasing price of maritime gasoline.