Virgin chief funds website to attack greenhouse gas from ships

AVIATION baron Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Airways, is funding a whistle blowing website to inform on ships and shipping companies that fail to measure up in the fight against alleged global warming.

"You can go online and see an estimate of how clean or dirty the ship is," said project leader Peter Boyd to a Sky News interviewer.

But International Chamber of Shipping's Peter Hinchcliffe condemned the method of calculation because it is based on the flawed United Nations standard. Raising industry objections at the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico, he described the online ship database as "misleading", pointing out that "ships have very different construction and safety requirements depending on their type and trade, which can cause their energy consumption to vary greatly."

The website - ShippingEfficiency.org - invites owners to show details of their fleet to eco-friendly shippers and charterers, enabling international brand name shippers with global trading patterns to pick ships with the best eco-friendly ratings to carry their products, reports New York-based Maritime Propulsion journal.

"It is with this business spin-off in mind that may lead some to wonder if the aims of this emission rating project are entirely altruistic, indeed it does seems a touch ironic that the proprietor of a major airline is leading this initiative," said the report.

The website has come up with its own energy efficiency rating using the UN's International Maritime Organisation's Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) as base, which is calculated on characteristics of ship design, ship capacity, engine power and fuel consumption.

"ShippingEfficiency.org has taken each individual ship (say a containership of 8,000 TEU) and compared its EEDI value with average values of other ships of that particular type and size. Ratings in descending value from A to G are then assigned to each ship in the database," said the report.
(Source:www.schednet.com)