Deploying Liquefied Natural Gas-Powered Ships in Response to the Maritime Emission Trading System: From the Perspective of Shipping Alliances

• DOI: 10.3390/jmse13030551
• Publication Date: 2025-03-13T08:18:32Z
• Authors: Yulong Sun; Jianfeng Zheng; Xin He; Zhihao Zhao; Di Cui

In response to climate change caused by shipping, the maritime emission trading system (METS) is used to reduce ship carbon emissions, and the METS also imposes additional costs on shipping carriers through emission permit trading. This paper focuses on the deployment of liquefied natural gas-powered (LNG-powered) ships for shipping alliances to comply with the METS. From the perspective of a liner alliance, we investigate how to determine the deployment of LNG-powered ships and how ship emissions will be affected. To investigate these problems, we propose an LNG-powered fleet deployment problem, which integrates slot co-chartering and emission permit trading, to determine the fleet deployment of LNG-powered and oil-powered ships, ship speeds and container shipment. To formulate our proposed problem, we develop a mixed-integer linear programming model, which can be solved effectively by CPLEX. Numerical experiments are provided to assess the effectiveness of our proposed model.