Ro-ro operator offers carmakers the opportunity to move their vehicles on vessels powered with cleaner fuels
United European Car Carriers (UECC) is on a sustainability journey and while it’s a route many have since embarked upon the company can certainly stake a claim to have been among the early pacesetters. A decade ago the Norwegian-headquartered ro-ro operator, which focuses on European short-sea transportation, ordered what became the first dual-fuel LNG pure car and truck carriers (PCTCs), Auto Eco and Auto Energy (delivered 2016).
UECC CEO Glenn Edvardsen explains: “Back in 2012, when we began planning for these vessels, the discussion around choice of fuel was nothing near what it is today. The only thing we were clear on was that we were not going to continue with oil. The choice of LNG was easy at the time because it was the most environmentally friendly fuel. Although we didn’t know what the cost of LNG would be in the future, we made a decision and stuck to it.”
Designed and built specifically for short-sea Baltic transportation, and thus to 1A Super ice class specifications, Auto Eco and Auto Energy also represented a significant scaling up in capacity from UECC’s older fleet, allowing it to replace five vessels with just two. Bunkering infrastructure, specifically a purpose-built LNG bunkering vessel part owned by UECC’s parent company NYK Line, was also key to making the project work.
No sooner had Auto Eco and Auto Energy been delivered, UECC began preparing for the next phase in its evolution. Following fresh investment in 2019, it ordered an additional three LNG battery hybrid PCTCs – Auto Advance, Auto Achieve and Auto Aspire (delivered 2021-22).
This new trio incorporated NOx Tier III compliant engines (two years ahead of it becoming mandatory for newbuildings operating in the Baltic region) and a design optimised both for the flexibility required for handling breakbulk and the increased weight of electric vehicles. A pioneering energy management system, utilising the battery for peak shaving and further emissions reduction, would come to serve as the blueprint for other operators.
UECC still has four older vessels that it has plans to replace with yet more innovative features. One safety factor likely to be high on the agenda is the increasingly prevalent risk of lithium-ion fires on board car carriers and the inclusion of more firefighting zones is a design factor under consideration. “We will definitely continue to invest for the future, that’s for sure,” says Edvardsen.
There has been no shortage of kudos for the company’s commitment to a cleaner future, with UECC and Auto Energy being the recipients of multiple Greenports awards and most recently in 2023 the Ford World Excellence Award for Sustainability, beating tens of thousands of automotive suppliers in achieving the honour.
Fuel evolution
But even with significant investment transitioning towards alternative fuels is far from an overnight process. For the first five years after delivery of Auto Eco and Auto Energy liquefied methane constituted a negligible component of the UECC fleet’s overall fuel consumption. By last year however around 35% of its requirements were being met by non-conventional fuels and while UECC currently projects that this figure will rise to 80% by the end of the decade there are optimistic predictions it could be revised to 100% if the current rate of progress continues.
Daniel Gent, UECC energy and sustainability manager
Daniel Gent, UECC’s energy and sustainability manager, readily admits he wasn’t fully onboard when the company first began exploring LNG a decade ago. “I came from a commodity trading background and was very much of a black oil mentality. We had a vessel trading into the Baltic where there was an abundance of cheap Russian HFO and the cost of a scrubber on a newbuilding could have been paid off in 10 months. Ten years on we can see that such an investment would have been a noose around our neck.”
Holistically speaking, UECC’s fleet comfortably meets the requirements for CII compliance for the next few years. With regard to FuelEU Maritime, the European Union instrument designed to gradually increase the share of renewable and low-carbon fuels being used within its territorial waters, it should remain in good stead until the middle of the next decade. Between them the LNG used by Auto Eco and Auto Energy equated to just over 5,000 mt in tank-to-wake CO2 emissions reduction across the UECC fleet by 2019.
However, even greater benefits were to be realised as the company began incorporating the use of biofuels from 2020 onwards, jumping to just under 62,000 mt last year (a reduction of more than 20%).
When it comes to biofuels, conventional wisdom within the maritime industry leans towards distillate-based fatty acid methyl esters (FAME). But, notwithstanding availability, the reliability, sustainability and provenance of some of these biofuels is regularly called into question. UECC’s own pursuit of viable solutions would draw the company into a variety of novel bio feedstocks such as residual FAME and animal tallow.
Gent explains: “We needed to identify which of the fuels are promising before there’s a rush on the market. With some of the fuels we found the storage capabilities weren’t conducive with the cars on board. They have to be kept at such a high heat in the storage tank that it generates heat on the deck which is going to cause issues with rubber tyres.”
Subsequently the company challenged biofuel producers to propose a cost-effective scalable solution and eventually settled upon cashew nutshell liquid (CNSL), a feedstock with extremely good sustainability credentials offering 95% well-to-wake emissions reduction. UECC is now with Netherlands-based fuel supplier ACT, engine maker Wärtsilä and Lloyd’s Register for in an ongoing trial study on board one of its vessels. So far the results, with the vessel currently operating on a blend ratio of 30% CNSL, are proving extremely promising and it is hoped to eventually run it almost entirely on CNSL-based pure biodiesel (B100).
Sail for change
At the start of 2024, UECC developed its CO2 Registry, an innovation that allows the company to transfer the benefits of clean fuel use to charterers in a transparent, independently verifiable manner. It paved the way for UECC’s Sail for Change programme, which formally launched over the summer.
In July it marked ‘Green Gas Month’ by deploying liquified bio methane deployed on all five of UECC’s LNG-fuelled car carriers, in what has been described as an industry first. The estimated well-to-wake emissions reduction for that month alone is reckoned by the company to have exceeded 8,000 mt of CO2. But a perhaps more significant facet is an innovative fuel switch scheme that allows customers to choose which fuel is used to carry its cargo.
Gent explains: “Sail for Change is the opportunity for customers to make a direct positive impact by facilitating a fuel change. The customer says: ‘I don’t want you to transport my cargo with VLSFO or MGO, I want you to transport it with a biofuel’. You can be specific about the fuel; the customer might want CNSL, or animal tallow, and they can enact that through this programme.”
UECC has already implemented Sail for Change with major customers such as BMW and works by aligning targets with the quantity of cargo being transported and the CO2 it generates. The key to being able to offer such a product was developing a commonly agreed methodology for calculating CO2 emissions on ro-ro vessels. Previously some groups based their calculation on grammes of CO2 per tonne-km, while others opted for cubic metres per km.
To resolve the matter UECC approached the Association of European Vehicle Logistics (ECG) to develop a new industry standard for short-sea ro-ro transportation; this method considers the characteristics of each vehicle and determines how many grammes of CO2 are produced by every unit.
“We decide with the customer how many grammes of CO2 they want to reduce by, e.g. 20,000 tonnes (which is approx. 5,000 units), make the fuel switch and introduce some alternative fuel on a mass balance basis. If we have a service with five vessels running on it that customer might have their volume spread evenly across all five vessels, but it might not be practical to have the biofuel on board all five vessels. So one vessel might have the biofuel on board but the emissions reduction savings are allocated only to that customer in a traceable way that cannot be duplicated,” says Gent.
Upon completion of the arrangement the customer receives an Impact Statement from the UECC CO2 Registry stating what has happened and, crucially, the Proof of Sustainability reference required by the EU for the fuel used, along with the feedstock, Bunker Delivery Note and logs from the ship’s engine room. Because the industry calculation methodology UECC helped develop excludes the use of biofuel it has no bearing on the carbon intensity reported to the customer. Consequently those who opt not to use biofuels cannot make a claim for reducing emissions, even though their cargo may in actuality be travelling on a vessel using such a fuel blend.
According to Gent it’s a further example of UECC’s commitment to leading by example in sustainable shipping, establishing best practices and innovative solutions that push the boundaries of what can be done to make the industry greener.
“This sector feels very much like the Wild West at the moment, and we’re trying to be the sheriff in our own little corner,” he concludes.
