OCCS catching up with green fuels

Onboard carbon capture and storage (OCCS) technology now allows as much as 80% of CO₂ to be captured from operation of a large ship, with a 30% fuel consumption increase, the Shanghai Marine Diesel Engine Research Institute (SMDERI) confirmed in conversation with Ship Repair Newsletter, potentially leading to a much more attractive value proposition for the retrofit marketOCCS systems would allow a ship to burn conventional heavy fuel oil, which could decrease in price as some vessels switch to bio- and e-fuels. Though ships equipped with an OCCS would have to burn additional fuel to support the carbon-capture reaction, cheap fuel could offset this premium, Haoran Yang, product manager at CSSC SMDERI QET, suggested. 

A CSSC carbon capture system has been retrofitted to Evergreen vessel Ever Top, capturing 40% of the emitted carbon. Currently, the carbon is not stored; rather, it is given to various offtakers within China which use it for welding and other purposes.

For this Evergreen vessel, the total cost is about USD 10 million, including the system and shipyard costs. Each container vessel retrofitted will likely suffer a cargo loss of around 200 TEU, due to the space consumed by the system. “In China, power and steel plants have very mature OCCS systems, so it’s a mature technology on land,” Yang said. “But we have to make it smaller and more energy saving for vessels, so in this respect, it is not yet a mature technology.”