Modeling Emissions of Shipping Operations in Sea Ice

The marine industry is a large contributor to overall global emissions and must mitigate its environmental impacts through innovation. These improvements can be achieved through combinations of design fundamentals, such as more efficient hull forms, technical innovations, such as wind-assisted propulsion, and operational transformations, such as switching to alternative fuels. Adopting various decarbonization measures will be expensive and must be informed by a detailed understanding of ship performance. In this paper, a method to predict carbon emissions is presented and applied to the case of a medium icebreaker. The emissions predictions are based on a model of ship resistance and propulsion in ice and open water, and they constitute an essential part of a general ship performance model. Route optimization can be informed by such ship performance models in combination with routing algorithms and rewards functions. Our goal is to incorporate a detailed emissions prediction method in a route optimization framework explicitly aimed at transits involving sea ice. The paper includes a description of a full-scale field trial through which we evaluate the accuracy of the predictions and develop a profile of emissions for tactical maneuvers to broaden the prediction capabilities. The results of the trials will be presented at the OMAE conference in Singapore.