NPR

The Dawn Of Low-Carbon Shipping

The shipping industry is starting to move away from pollutant-intensive heavy fuel oil. Scientists and private companies are betting on a clean replacement technology: hydrogen fuel cells.
Container ships and other maritime vessels currently run on pollutant-intensive heavy fuel oil. The world's largest container-shipping company, Maersk, has promised to make its operations zero carbon by 2050. Doing so will require using new fuels such as hydrogen.

The global shipping industry is enormous — thousands of ships carry billions of dollars of goods each year across nearly every ocean on the planet.

Those ships run mostly on a particularly dirty type of fuel known as heavy fuel oil, or bunker fuel. It's thick and sooty, and when it burns, it emits sulfur and particulate matter that can cause respiratory illness. It also emits greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, which trap heat in the atmosphere and cause global warming.

"If shipping was a country, it would be the sixth-largest polluter in the world," says Nerijus Poskus of the shipping technology company

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