Q & A: Ardmore Shipping and Sustainability

Q & A: Ardmore Shipping and Sustainability

December 11, 2024 Back to news

Decarbonization has emerged as a pivotal challenge in the maritime industry, and Ardmore Shipping has positioned itself as a leader in sustainable innovation. In a recent conversation with The Motorship, Garry Noonan - Director, Innovation at Ardmore Shipping - detailed the company's comprehensive approach to energy efficiency and sustainability. This includes the adoption of advanced energy efficiency technologies and implementing initiatives under its Energy Transition Plan, which involved a $40 million investment in carbon capture-ready scrubbers and other innovations last year.

The Motorship: How does Ardmore Shipping approach the challenge of becoming more energy-efficient while remaining competitive?

Garry Noonan: "Energy efficiency has never been bad for business, if we can collaborate with each other and understand what other people are doing. We don't necessarily have to do the whole trial ourselves, we deal with a lot of different companies. From a competition point of view, you have to understand the limitations of when you can and can't talk."

TM: With the future of fuels still uncertain, how does Ardmore prepare for what's ahead?

GN: "With the future fuel horizon being unknown right now, we try and concentrate on what we can do, and that's making the vessels we have more efficient. Again, we want to try and do what we can now, and hull coatings is a big one for us, it's incredibly cheap when you compare it to the cost of the five-year cycle of repainting the entire hull."

TM: What's your take on hull coatings and their role in energy efficiency?

GN: "We're trialing various types of remote-operated vehicles for hull cleaning so that we can try and optimize our hull cleaning. We have a task force internally that looks at the hull cleaning specifically and performance of each individual vessel. Unfortunately, no matter how good the coating is, if a vessel sits idle for a long period of time, you're going to have to clean it. It is a fine balancing line between having coating available towards the end of the vessel's life and making sure it's cleaned as frequently as possible. I suppose proactive cleaning is something we see as being a massive part of shipping in the future, no matter what happens with future fuels as the one thing that is for sure is they're going to be more expensive. When these fuels become more expensive, the fuel efficiency is going to be even more critical."

TM: How do regulations affect your approach to hull coatings?

GN: "Looking at the regulations coming in, New Zealand was an early adopter, there's more and more coming in around when you can clean and where you can clean, and the actual kind of coatings you can use in certain areas. It's definitely an area where we're very active. If you look at our own performance monitoring tool, last year, that saved over 21,000 metric tons of CO2 itself. It's a sizeable number for us to be able to put that down on paper to say that we have saved this purely through looking at what we have and looking at other coatings. We're trying more and more to move away from biocidal coatings to more non-toxic coatings, and that's what we're trialing at the moment."

TM: Can you elaborate on Ardmore Shipping's approach to new technology?

GN: "Our approach to new technology is kind of in four steps, and that's understanding the technology, making assumptions about the technology, trialing, and then execution. It's quite easy to see if we think it's something that works because we have it on every vessel. So, we try to be pioneers but not guinea pigs, or too early."

TM: What are your thoughts on complying with new maritime regulations generally?

GN: "We don't believe in waiting till the 11th hour to try and understand them, we want to try and get in early, see if there is a competitive advantage behind understanding them. If there's an option to comply, then you're going to have to take that otherwise the only other option is non-compliance. We very much want to comply, even the phrase non-compliance just doesn't sit right."

TM: With the industry evolving, where do you see it heading in the next few years?

GN: "So there is still fruit on the tree, from an energy efficiency point of view. Everything's looking good. Future fuel wise, I don't see much happening in the next 12 to 18 months, maybe even 10 years, when you're tramping, availability becomes the issue, and we're not seeing a massive rollout on infrastructure for that."

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