Multicriteria Analysis of Alternative Marine Fuels in Sustainable Coastal Marine Traffic

Abstract

Marine transportation is considered to be one of the most important aspects of global transportation services. Due to the increase in marine transportation, there are significant impacts on the marine environment. One of the possible measures for mitigation of the environmental impact could be switching to environmentally friendly fuel. However, the alternative fuel selection process is considered to be a problem due to various criteria to be considered and stakeholders that should be involved in the selection process. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the application of multicriteria analysis as a decision-support tool for the alternative marine fuel selection problem in coastal marine traffic. The suggested methodology takes into account environmental, technological, and economic aspects, and ensures the participation of different stakeholders in the selection process. The priority ranking of the alternatives is based on a combination of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Simple Additive Weighting (SAW). The implementation of this method considers the involvement of relevant stakeholders through evaluation of the criteria weights and performance of each alternative with respect to each criterion. The method is applied for the case study of Croatia, where the results demonstrated that the best alternative for all stakeholders is electric propulsion, even though there are differences in opinions and perceptions with respect to the objectives and criteria. The findings of this analysis, likely the first of this type in this area, can serve as a solid basis for strategic planning.

Assessing the Environmental Impact of Eight Alternative Fuels in International Shipping: A Comparison of Marginal vs. Average Emissions

“…Bilgili provided one comprehensive study of the environmental impact of four fossil marine fuels, concluding that heavy fuel oil (HFO) is a preferable alternative [21], and compared eight alternative marine fuels with LCA, concluding that biogas has the lowest total environmental impact [22]. In addition to these comprehensive studies, a large number of other good studies also exist, e.g., describing individual fuels (LNG [23][24][25][26][27][28][29], methane [30] methanol [31][32][33][34][35], HVO [36,37], hydrogen [38], ammonia [38,39] and electricity [40]), comparing different fuels [9,14,[41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59], or assessing other ways of improving the sustainability of the maritime industry [1,[60][61][6...…”

Analysis of local governments’ marine governance efficiency using a spatiotemporal coupling coordination model: a case study of coastal cities in Liaoning Province, China

“…The AHP is a widely used, mature method of determining weights, but it has the disadvantage of poor objectivity. This study used the AHP to first compare the 14 lowest-level indicators; determines the priority of each indicator based on expert opinions (Feng et al, 2014;Mandić et al, 2021); rate each from 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 to indicate the relative importance, and then Liu et al Computational Urban Science (2022) 2:32 constructs a judgment matrix. Then deter-mine the maximum eigenvalue of the comparison judgment matrix and its eigenvector (Clark & Tilman, 2017).…”

A Discussion on Alternative Fuel Criteria for Maritime Transport

“…The technical criterion relates to the use of the fuel on board and includes machinery (and machinery) modifications, fuel storage conditions, supply and infrastructure constraints (Brynolf, 2014;Thomson et al, 2015;Svanberg et al, 2018;Hansson et al, 2019Andersson et al, 2020). One study concluded that technical conditions are accepted as the most important criteria by shipowners (Mandić et al, 2021).…”

“…In addition, human health indirectly falls within the scope of this criterion(Brynolf, 2014;Thomson et al, 2015;Svanberg et al, 2018;Hansson et al, 2019Andersson et al, 2020). The environmental criterion is most accepted among academicsBilgili (2022) Marine Science and Technology Bulletin 11(3): 352-360355(Mandić et al, 2021). This criterion constitutes a very important basis for the existence of alternative fuels, and the compliance of alternative fuels with existing and then potential environmental regulations has a primary priority.…”