A greener sea with Greensee

November 24, 2023

Luc Terral, CEO of Greensee explains how their AI and IoT solutions help to make shipping lines more environmentally friendly

Could you give us an overview of Greensee and its history?

As a pioneer in maritime IoT analytics, Greensee is leading the intermodal shipping industry towards sustainability. For over 15 years, Greensee founders have developed expertise in Artificial Intelligence and IoT hardware and sensors to optimise maritime, industrial and utilities’ operations, yielding substantial energy savings and CO2 emission reductions.

Over the last five years, Greensee’s parent company has been dedicated to maritime IoT analytics, assisting shipping lines in optimising their refrigerated container operations. This focus has predominantly led to energy savings and substantial reductions in CO2 emissions. To provide some context, it’s worth noting that reefers are powered by electricity generated from vessel fuels, and on certain trade lanes, they can account for up to 30% of the total voyage emissions.

In 2023, the company widened its scope of services to strategically address dry container CO2 emissions. As a result, Greensee was launched to offer highly precise and granular CO2 calculation and optimisation services for both reefer and dry containers.

Greensee solutions have shown significant potential for CO2 savings — up to a staggering 30 to 40 million tons annually. This goal aligns perfectly with the International Maritime Organization’s 2030 objectives for greenhouse gas emission reductions of 30%[1].

We offer our solutions to all market players: equipment manufacturers, carriers and operators, freight forwarders, shippers and other stakeholders.

How is Greensee contributing to more sustainable and energy-efficient shipping?

Measuring accurately GHG emissions from the intermodal shipping industry is a first and critical step towards GHG emission reductions. Our solution can benchmark actual emissions against baseline scenarios, find optimised routes, optimised operation modes, and provide the industry with actionable insights which can reduce GHG emissions by up to 20%, for any container shipment in the world.

With more than 200 million container trips occurring annually, this 20% reduction equates to a potential reduction of 30 to 40 million tons of CO2 equivalent emissions, which accounts for over 65% of the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) 2030 targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

In light of upcoming EU regulations that will enforce CO2 taxes in 2024, all shipping lines operating in and out of the EU will be obligated to compute their emissions and procure an adequate number of CO2 emission allowances to offset their real emissions. We project that these carbon taxes will reach $10 billion annually by 2026, as emission trading schemes (ETS) become fully enforced. We anticipate shipping lines initiating the transfer of these taxes to their clients in the form of emission surcharges, beginning in January 2024.

These surcharges will be applied for each container shipment, and the market will need emission data per container to understand and integrate emissions surcharges. We deliver this visibility to the market, by transforming accurate vessel emissions data into accurate container level emissions, which is the only data shippers and logistics service providers can understand and use.

Greensee also produces benchmark emissions data for any container shipment, enabling the market to use an emission baseline which can be useful to all stakeholders involved including logistic service providers, shipping lines, trucking companies, or last mile delivery.

What is “Calculate” and how does it benefit your customers?

The core of our offerings is the ‘Calculate’ solution, a pioneer in accurate CO2 container level emissions calculations, segmented by each transportation leg.

Calculate empowers the calculation of CO2eq emissions using booking data from any container shipment worldwide. It furnishes our customers with precise CO2eq emissions data for each transportation leg (ocean, road, rail, etc.) as well as the cumulative emissions for the entire journey of the container shipment.

Capitalising on the vast data we’ve collected, our accurate analytics and proven methodologies help customers compute, manage, and even reduce emission surcharges. Key performance indicators further aid in tracking the efficiency of operational changes, transforming emissions from perceived liabilities into long-term sustainability assets.

What are the differences between “Calculate Basic” and “Calculate Plus” and who might benefit more from each?

In addition to the ‘basic’ CO2eq calculations, Calculate Plus offers a baseline scenario for benchmarking sustainability reduction initiatives.

Calculate Plus can for example identify and quantify CO2 reduction benefits from modal shifts (from road to rail, or barges) for any terminal, any trade lane, or any shipment.

It also provides detailed CO2 reductions data for light weight containers, helps evaluate the impact of alternative and low carbon energy (LNG, e-fuels such as e-methanol, or synthetic, low carbon fuels) on total GHG emissions, or identifies CO2 emissions reductions savings.

Usually, our customers start using Calculate Basic to calculate, understand, and report their CO2 emissions, and eventually transition to Calculate Plus to find optimisation scenarios to support their sustainability goals.

Once data is obtained from the Greensee calculators, what is the next step?

Our solution will compute automatically CO2eq emissions and will provide CO2eq emissions results to the customer, either via API, or via downloads.

This simple and precise CO2 emission solution helps shipping lines, logistics service providers and shippers compute and control emissions surcharges, carriers are starting to apply, January 2024.

It is also an analytical tool which can produce regular KPIs to track progress and efficiency metric of any operational changes.

Tracking and reducing CO2 emissions doesn’t have a be a burden and Greensee provides a simple and efficient method to implement such a tracking tool.

What other services does Greensee provide?

Greensee Voyage provides ocean routing optimisation for container vessels, based on reefer energy usage optimisation. Some vessels use up to 30% of their fuel to power reefers and by using Greensee Voyage alternative routes can be calculated, based on atmospheric weather forecasts, to reduce reefer energy usage.

This solution enables 3-7% fuel savings on most of trans-oceanic crossings and can save up to 500,000 tons of CO2 per year.

We also help manufacturing companies design more sustainable equipment for the industry, and we help leasing companies package greener containers and reefers for their clients.

Last (or first in the chronology of our roadmap), we designed Artificial Intelligence (digital twins running supervised Machine Learning technologies) based predictive maintenance solutions for OEM’s and asset management and energy optimization tools for shipping lines.

Most solutions have been patented and are provided both as SaaS (Software as a Service) packages or as an “on premise” solutions (implemented and running on our customers’ platforms). We also customise all solutions to fit our customers’ specific environment and train our AI solutions with our customers’ own data sets, to deliver fully customised, highly accurate analytics (up to 99% accuracy levels, measured as R²).

What have been some of the standout comments received from your customers?

Customers find the solutions easy to use and simple enough to integrate quickly and efficiently so they can meet the 2024 ETS regulation with confidence. Our customers will now be able to forecast the required allowance to meet their CO2 emissions, based on container shipments forecasts in and out of Europe.

The prevailing market feedback suggests that converting emissions data into shipment units or conducting assets’ lifecycle analysis aligns with sound business practices. It aids our customers in making informed decisions about where to commence and identifying their foremost priorities for minimising tax exposure and reducing their clients’ carbon footprints.

Why would you recommend shipping lines to choose Greensee?

Our solution doesn’t require any upfront capital investment, it provides an immediate return on investment (savings potentials are x10 plus), and helps shipping lines measure, understand and track CO2 emissions for any container.

This is mission critical for shipping lines which will have to apply emission surcharges to their customers and be able to justify these with accurate and proven methodologies.

We also hold the belief that Greensee, along with its suite of solutions, can help accelerate the shift in the culture of shipping lines toward a data-centric business approach. We enable the conversion of GHG emissions, traditionally viewed as liabilities, into enduring sustainability practices and revenue streams.

What can Greensee do for Shippers and Freight Forwarders?

Greensee provides shippers and freight forwarders with per-trip and annual CO2 emissions calculations for their global supply chain activities, enabling them to promote sustainability to their customers meet the reporting obligations imposed by regulatory authorities. We are observing a growing trend in the enactment of legislation, not only on a national level but also within the USA, with states like California mandating CO2 emissions reporting.

In summary, our solutions deliver precise emissions data at the container level, offering vital information for the industry’s transition toward a more environmentally sustainable business landscape.

[1] https://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/Environment/Pages/2023-IMO-Strategy-on-Reduction-of-GHG-Emissions-from-Ships.aspx