PIANC Smart Rivers 2022

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Abstract: ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

Inland navigation trade, until today, has been predominantly dependent on the use of fossil fuels. The use of fossil fuel in the energy conversion of assets in modern life meets increasing pressure to eliminate hazardous emissions and greenhouse gas production. Post-IPCC2015 and post-IPCC2021  regulations, national and regional climate measures and regulations, and developing IMO regulations in terms of CO2, NOx and SOx reflect this pressure. The environmental performance of the inland fleet is part of this development. The state of the art is, that a broad portfolio of new and alternative fuels (i.e. hydrogen or biofuels), innovative propulsion configurations (e.g. fuel cells) and innovative ship designs (i.e. air lubrication) are proposed or even built to address these environmental requirements. But as observed in the past for LNG propulsion, there are the concerns as to what comes first, the infrastructure development to support alternate propulsion or a sufficient number of vessels with these alternate propulsion systems to make the infrastructure development economically feasible/profitable. This gives rise to the need for collaborative and complementary design of both infrastructure and ships.  As a result, from a societal and economic perspective, there is great interest in assessing proper benchmarks to grade upgrades, modifications and innovations of inland ships and to assess the effect of design-, operational- and regulatory measures on the holistic environmental performance of ships, corridors and ports.
 While inland navigation trade is progressing towards an environmentally sustainable transport system, there is a need for an assessment framework for a numerical indexation of the environmental performance of both inland ships and inland ship corridors. As the inland trade is different from maritime trade, it has its own set of constraints, concerns and requirements. The  PIANC Working Group 229 has been established  to propose guidelines to develop these Sustainable Performance Indicators for Inland Navigation. 
The paper makes a state-of-the-art assessment of methods which describe the environmental performance of both inland ships and inland ship corridors. The baseline of the research is described in Jacobs et al “Maritime environmental performance indicators for urban waterways in Amsterdam”.   This methodology describes the balance between “cost to society” versus “benefits to society” in index format, like emissions in gram/kWh. 
In the paper, an analysis of the environmental index and representative units is performed. A review is made of maritime environmental performance indicators, like the Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) and Environmental Ship Index of the International Association of Ports and Harbours. The review matches these insights with the challenges of the inland shipping operations, like confined waters, up- and downstream navigation, low and changing waterdepths and a broad distribution of required propulsive powers. 
An overview of current environmental performance indicators of several knowledge institutes and waterway institutions will be presented, and a case study with these approaches is performed using a benchmark corridor with a representative density of inland ship traffic. 
The paper will discuss challenges of indicators and labels on ship level and indicators and labels on corridor level, and how ship level labels could be integrated in indicators for the environmental performance on corridor level. The required data for establishing the performance indicator will be analysed, including the (absence of) public availability of these data and how these data can be gathered. 
Given the availability of environmental performance parameters, the impact of introduction of renewable fuels (hydrogen, methanol, others) on the indexes will be analysed, and how this can effect the environmental performance indicator of inland ship corridors. 
Finally, the conclusions of  the  PIANC Working Group 229 on  guidelines to develop Sustainable Performance Indicators for Inland Navigation will be presented. An essential effort to support the transition of inland ships and inland shipping corridors towards a sustainable future.

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