Abstract
Nowadays, maritime air pollution is regarded as a severe threat to coastal communities’ health. Therefore, many policies to reduce air pollution have been established worldwide. Moreover, there has been a shift in policy and research attention from greenhouse gases, especially CO2, to other air pollutants. To address the current local environmental challenges, this research analyzes the non-greenhouse gas emissions inventory (CO, NOx, SOx, PM, VOC, and NH3) from ships in the second biggest port in Korea, the Port of Incheon (POI). A bottom-up activity-based methodology with real-time vessel activity data produced by the Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) is applied to obtain reliable estimations. NOx and SOx dominated the amount of emission emitted from ships. Tankers, general cargo ships, cruise ships, and container ships were identified as the highest sources of pollution. Based on the above results, this study discusses the need for long-term policies, such as the designation of a local emission control area (ECA) and the establishment of an emission management platform to reduce ship-source emissions. Furthermore, this study elucidates that significant emissions come from the docking process, ranging from 33.9% to 42.0% depending on the type of pollutant when only the auxiliary engines were being operated. Therefore, short-term solutions like applying exhausted gas cleaning systems, using on-shore power supplies, reducing docking time, or using greener alternative fuels (e.g., liquefied natural gas or biofuels) should be applied and motivated at the POI. These timely results could be useful for air quality management decision-making processes for local port operators and public agencies.
Highlights
Maritime transportation is generally accepted as a more environmentally friendly mode of transport, the enormous amount of pollutants emitted by international trade and the growth of port traffic have raised an increasing awareness of the shipping trade’s heavy influence on air pollution [1]
This study aims to cover and consider all ship activities in 2017 at the Port of Incheon (POI) using data obtained from the Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) system. 17,316 ship calls from the 2583 ships which were operated at the POI were reported from the VTS-based Korean Port Management Information System (Port-MIS)
The awareness of environmental issues caused by rapidly increasing port traffic has motivated the necessity of a complete assessment of the negative environmental impacts caused by shipping fleet activities
Summary
Maritime transportation is generally accepted as a more environmentally friendly mode of transport, the enormous amount of pollutants emitted by international trade and the growth of port traffic have raised an increasing awareness of the shipping trade’s heavy influence on air pollution [1]. In recent decades, close-to-land ship emissions, especially in-port emissions, and their serious impacts on the local atmosphere and the community’s health have received increasing attention from the public sector and research fields [6,7,8]. Researchers have proved that emissions can disturb climate (GHGs drive the radiative imbalance of the atmosphere), the coastal air quality (NOx and SOx contribute to acidification; NOx enhances surface ozone formation), and community health (NOx, SOx, PM, and CO decrease cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary functions and increase the rate of lung cancer and respiratory diseases) [5,6,9,10,11,12,13]
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