UK: BMT Group Announces Its Involvement in Low-Carbon Shipping Research

BMT Group, the leading international maritime design, engineering and risk management consultancy, has announced its involvement as an industrial partner in a three year research project aimed at limiting the environmental impact of carbon emissions from the world’s shipping systems. 90% of goods arrive in the UK by ship and current estimates show shipping’s share of global emissions could increase to 20-30% by 2050.

The research project, ‘Low carbon shipping – a systems approach’ will help the shipping industry to reduce levels of emissions in order to comply with new legislation and mitigate global warming. The project has received £1.7m from the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Energy Programme, part of the £530m the programme is investing in research in low-carbon technologies.

The project will involve BMT in two main work packages:

– Technologies for low carbon shipping (including innovation in retrofit solutions)

– Energy efficient ship operations (including human factors).

BMT will be part of a multi-disciplinary consortium made up of researchers from five universities and international industrial partners such as Lloyd’s Register, Shell and Rolls Royce. BMT is well placed to play an important role in delivering these work packages, with its track record in on-board performance monitoring of fuel efficiency and emissions, energy efficiency design indexing, performance impacts of hull roughness and fouling and the design and engineering of more efficient propulsion plant.

Dr Phil Thompson, Sector Director for transport at BMT Group, said “This is a very exciting opportunity to make a real difference to the design and operation of ships. We have to drive down costs and we have to drive down emissions. We at BMT are delighted to be using our experience in such an important research project by developing innovative design solutions. After all, a more efficient ship is a greener ship.”

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Source: BMT, June 6, 2011.