My Lords, I agree very much with what the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, just said about these regulations. I have no problem with them, as she has already said, but I regret very much the considerable delay that has occurred in bringing them forward, and I hope that we will hear some sort of explanation from the Minister when she comes to sum up.
These regulations are not a great surprise. Our shipping industry has been well aware of what is going on for quite some time now, and it has been forced to act by the introduction of these emission control areas, which stole a march on the International Maritime Organization’s regulations by bringing in things that applied not to the whole world but merely to the specific areas that the Minister mentioned. By and large, our own ships have already made the necessary adjustments to be able to operate in these low-sulphur areas.
I have been in this House for 45 years—I am horrified to say it—and in that period I have seen our merchant fleet reduced from a fairly large standing in the world to something that is almost pathetic compared with what it was. We are not the force in international shipping that we were and that is a huge regret, but this country still has great expertise in the maritime field. The Government have set up a new committee to look into things such as finding a new means of propulsion, in effect to try to replace the internal combustion engine. I do not know how that is going, and the Minister probably cannot help me on that, but we still have a part to play in international shipping.
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I am afraid we are no longer involved in the mainstream container business, where P&O was the last company with a large part in that industry. That moved over to Holland, to the Dutch company Nedlloyd, and is now part of the giant Maersk corporation, the Danish giant. There is a company that is entirely committed to reducing marine pollution. The noble Baroness mentioned that at London International Shipping Week, the aim is to have a carbon-neutral industry by 2050. Maersk is very much committed to that and has the first sizeable ship that will use carbon-neutral fuel coming into service in 2023. That will be, by container standards, a fairly small ship—2,000 20-foot equivalent units—but it will be powered by e-methanol, or green methanol, and also able to use standard low-sulphur oil. In a way, the company is hedging its bets, because nobody yet knows how much of the new fuel can be produced, so it must have an alternative. I understand that it aims to produce that e-methanol by using wind power.
On top of that new ship coming on stream, the company has also ordered eight much larger ships—16,000 containers—which will all be in service by 2024. Those ships are quite a bit more expensive than normal ships —10% to 15% more expensive—and cost $175 million. The eight ships are costing $1.4 billion. That has been the problem for the shipping industry: there have been few alternatives to using normal fuel and it has been expensive to make any changes.
What Maersk is aiming to do is a great step forward. It is the bigger ships that cause the problem. I have seen it mentioned that one large container ship with a 100,000 horsepower engine produces more rubbish out of its exhaust than millions of cars. That is probably true, but we must remember that ships provide more than 80% of the world’s trade and, if we are to find any means of solving this problem, it must be one that works well.
There is hope for the future, certainly in terms of smaller ships. There are fuels such as liquified natural gas, biofuels, green hydrogen—even electricity, because one company that operates on the Dover Strait has been looking at the possibility of an electric ferry running between Dover and Calais. All sorts of encouraging work is going on. As I said, the shipping industry has been fairly slow to react, but it is very much getting its act together now, and I hope we will see enormous improvements in future. In the meantime, I support the regulations.