Ina De Vlieger

Emissions of maritime transport: a European reference system.

Emissions from ships have recently received more attention since they have become a significant concern for air quality in harbours and port cities. This paper presents the methodology for a comprehensive maritime transport database of activity data, specific energy consumption, emission factors, and total emissions that have been developed within the European EX-TREMIS project. The model is built upon 3 modules: the fleet module, the transport activity module, and the emission module. The fleet module defines the ship categories, the loading capacities, and the engine characteristics of the different vessels by using EUROSTAT data, Sea Web Lloyds database, and international literature. The transport activity module transforms total cargo handled (mainly based on EUROSTAT data and CEMT statistics) into ship-equivalents. These ship-equivalents are further transformed into ship-hours. The emission module calculates energy uses and CO(2), NO(X), SO(2), CO, HC, CH(4), NMHC, PM emissions from the resulting maritime activities. We have used technology based emission factors to take into account the technological evolution of vessels. To illustrate this new methodology, we present some results (emissions, fuel consumption and emission factors) for different countries. The overall methodology as well as the results and the country specific energy consumption and emission factors per ship type and size class can be extracted from the EX-TREMIS website (www.ex-tremis.eu). Our results contribute to more accurate estimates of emissions and air quality assessments in coastal cities and ports.

TRENDS AND UNCERTAINTY IN AIR POLLUTION IMPACTS AND EXTERNAL COSTS OF BELGIAN PASSENGER CAR TRAFFIC

The main objective of this paper is to track the changing importance of air pollution impacts by Belgian passenger cars. Our assessment of environmental impacts is based on the calculation of external costs with the ExternE methodology. Our results show that the decline of air pollution impacts from Belgian passenger cars between 1993 and 1998 was limited. This is explained by the combination of three contributing factors the slow turnover of the fleet, the typical Belgian high and growing percentage of diesel fuelled passenger cars and the annual increase of the average mileage per car. The secondary objective is to investigate to what degree the choice of emission factors influences our conclusions. Although estimates of the overall cost of air pollution derived from MEET and Infras are similar, the trend towards improved air quality is more pronounced for MEET.

Is Driving 1 km to Work Worse for the Environment Than Driving 1 km for Shopping

One of the measures that is promoted in order to improve the air quality is the decrease of vehicle mileage. However, there are different reasons to assume that not every kilometer driven by car yields the same impact on air pollution nor on the exposure of people. For instance, some trips are driven at high speeds on highways, while others are driven at relatively low speeds in urban environments. This will have an impact on the resulting emissions. Furthermore, emissions exhausted during the night will have a larger impact on the ground-level concentrations than emissions exhausted during the day, due to the higher atmospheric stability. And another aspect is that emissions produced in cities will affect a larger population than emissions in sparsely populated areas. These and other aspects are examined in this chapter. Analysis of the results per trip purpose shows that driving 1 km to work increases the pollutant concentrations about 1.3–1.4 times more than driving 1 km to go shopping, mainly due, but not confined to, the time of the day at which the activity is performed.