Andrea Carli, Air Life SRL gave a presentation on ‘’Using Selective Catalytic Reduction to comply with NOX Tier III’’ at the 2016 GREEN4SEA Conference & Awards. He reminded that for areas designated as NOx Emission Control Areas, new ships will need to meet the standards of Tier III, a reduction of 80% compared to Tier I standards. IMO MARPOL Annex VI imposes mandatory standards for the emissions of new build engines, according to which Tiers I, II, III were set. Airlife’s selective catalytic reduction system effectively removes 90% of NOx emitted from the exhaust gas of a ship and also the emission of carbon monoxide and other hydrocarbons in compliance with the IMO MARPOL Annex VI
NOx is an important issue to be investigated. Today, marine represent 1/3 of the global NOx emission, big portion of these emissions are the public electricity generations or the power plants and the automotive. In contrast to the automotive and the power industry and the other combustion searches marine is an industrial sector that has not been affected so much at the moment by stringent legislation on NOx removal; that means it is the next target for the operators, for the suppliers, for the IMO of course to take care of environmental impact from the ships. Another important issue to be considered is that 70% of the global traffic is sailing closer than 2,200 miles of land; that means that the impact of NOx emission from any kind of vessel is very close to the land and it also means that it’s important to drive this kind of new legislation in order to prevent as much as we can at the impact of the NOx emission on the environmental area where all of us are living.
Just to give you some very simple numbers to let you understand the importance of the NOx emission in the world, one giant cargo ship emits a quantity of nitrogen oxide, that is NOx, that is more or less equivalent to seven million passenger cars. For example, a cruise ship visiting a single port on a day it makes the same quantity that is emitted by 12,400 cars in a point; it is like having a meeting of 12,400 cars at the same time and at the same point.
We need to think about the future as we expect 20% rise on this kind of emission from the ships. In the next five years due to the global shipping activity increase, we have to think that the marine industry must give a sort of solution to that because the same solution has been given already both for the inland industries or the combustion sources like the power plants or the waste incineration, the stationary engines and so on, and also by the automatic sector.
What’s the status today in terms of regulation? IMO issued in the past a different type of NOx reduction legislation starting from Tier I in 2000. You can see the different efficiency in terms of NOx removal below or the different emission factors.
Tier II was issued again for new ships in 2011 and it is now covering the majority of the ships, the next actual step will be affecting the new ships staring on 2016 but only in the famous so-called emission control area, so designated areas, and there is still a discussion whether this 2016 can be eventually delayed even more for some specific region. You can see that there is a big gap between Tier II and Tier III in terms of NOx reductions. From Tier I to Tier III we have to think about 80% NOx reduction independently more or less by the rate of the engine speed. The following picture depicts the actual emission control areas, under IMO regulation:
North American and Caribbean and in Europe, more or less Baltic and North Sea there are trends and discussions about the future; introduction of new ECA such as in the Mediterranean, Japan and north of Norway; all these are in any case under discussion and nobody knows what would be the trend of the fuel price in the future. Nobody knows a new legislation or a new emission control areas will be issued in the future. The only clear answer is that sooner or later, we will have the need to put NOx control on a greater amount of vessels than we do today.
We provide a simple solution, a consolidated technology which is being applied since 1960, for more than 50 years, in all the older industrial sector, starting on power plants going to waste incineration, going through stationary engines, cement plants, glass plants. The technology was invented by Mitsubishi more or less in the 1960s. It is a much consolidated technology, very simple technology and effective. Our solution, that we need micro, to provide you a simple understanding about the footprint of our system is based on the so called selective catalytic reduction SCR process that would remove 90% of the nitrogen oxide from different ship engines, either propulsion, or auxiliary, pumps and so on, enabling therefore to comply with the IMO NOx emission levels for these ships operating in the NOx emission control areas as governed by the regulation. Air Life microsystem is a very simple product and has been applied before the marine industry on several projects on different industrial sectors such as engines, waste incineration, power plants and so on. Some of the benefits of our system are long catalyst lifetime, special catalyst regeneration after a certain time; that would give additional lifetime to the catalyst without needing to replace it and very high emission removal-more than 90%- low ammonia slip.
Above text is an edited article of Andrea Carli’s presentation during the 2016 GREEN4SEA Conference & Awards
You may view his video presentation by clicking here
The views presented hereabove are only those of the author and not necessarily those of GREEN4SEA and are for information sharing and discussion purposes only.
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About Andrea Carli,
Sales and Marketing Manager Air life SRL
Mr. Andrea Carli, born in 1969, has graduated in Chemical Engineering at Bologna Univerysity (Italy), and he’s also taken a Master in Environmental Chemical Engineering by the same University in 1994.Since he started the professional career, he has taken job positions on Engineering, Procurement & Construction (EPC) companies, mainly active on Emission Control Environmental Technologies and on Oil & Gas Industry.After 15 years of international experience as Process Engineer, Proposal Engineer, Proposal & Marketing Manager, Sales Manager, he has created the company AirLife Srl in 2008, with the main purpose to provide clients with innovative, tailor-made and fully reliable technical solutions for their emission control needs.Together with his active role as Sales & Marketing Director in AirLife, he’s also working as private consultants for several important industrial clients worldwide.
