The most potent proof of Hong Kong’s long and abundant maritime history is, increasingly, the ubiquitous haze that blurs the city’s skyline.
In this, the world’s third-busiest container port, after Singapore and Shanghai, according to the Hong Kong Marine Department, commercial tankers, ferries and fishing boats exhale noxious fumes into air that already, by the World Health Organization’s standards, is healthy only 41 days of the year. Twelve percent of all container traffic passes through the surrounding Pearl River Delta, the southern Chinese export hub where 38 million people live in a swath of land roughly the size of the San Francisco Bay Area.
But initiatives to clear the air by way of the sea are in motion. Where softwood Chinese sailing junks once plied the waters, three new solar hybrid ferries now shuttle Hong Kong Jockey Club members between the Kowloon Peninsula and a public golf course on Kau Sai Chau Island, six kilometers, or about four miles, away. The silent, sleek, blue-and-yellow catamarans, commissioned by the Jockey Club in a bid to encourage the cleanup effort, are designed by the Australian company Solar Sailor. They use photovoltaic panels on the cabin roof to power their electric engines when near the wharf: when farther offshore, they transition to diesel.
A fourth vessel, outfitted with sails covered in solar cells and due to be delivered next month, will run educational programs that focus on renewable energy.
These sails were inspired by the way insects evolved, said Robert Dane, the chief executive of Solar Sailor. Ancient insects “evolved wings initially as solar collectors and later used them to fly.”
According to the Jockey Club, the technology has resulted in fuel savings of 50 percent. The club, although it is a nonprofit association, expects to make a profitable return on its investment in just two years if oil prices remain high.
And it is not the only body in the region to have hopped on board. Another of Mr. Dane’s boats, sold to the solar manufacturer Suntech Power Holdings, drifts alongside the site of the 2010 Shanghai Expo on the Huangpu River.
Lately, Mr. Dane has been eyeing Hong Kong’s emblematic Star Ferry fleet — 12 vessels that carry passengers across Victoria Harbor — for conversion to hybrid electricity. The ferries are serviced by the same southern Chinese boatyard that finishes his boats. He is eager to move on to bigger boats and he says he is optimistic — certain, even — that shipping will begin to turn away from fuel oil as renewable alternatives gain speed.
“There’s all that wind and sun and wave energy out there in the ocean,” he said. “Why would you go back to land to get fuel? In the future, when we can store that energy as efficiently as we can a barrel of oil, all ships will be powered by that which is available on the sea.”
Until then, several of the world’s largest container shipping companies have banded together in a voluntary, unsubsidized effort to curb the toxins that their cargo vessels emit. The initiative is being led by the Danish shipping giant Maersk Line, whose ships, as of September, have switched to low-sulfur fuel from bunker fuel — a viscous waste product of the refining process — while at berth in Hong Kong.
“We still believe that the environment is a coming megatrend,” said Tim Smith, chief executive of Maersk’s North Asia operations. “Increasingly, our customers have sustainability programs of their own and it is likely that they will start using environmental criteria to determine which carriers they use.”
The company also hopes that the shift will help accelerate emissions regulation in Asia, which is not yet subject to controls that would oblige ships to use relatively cleaner fuel along its coastlines. Such policies are prevalent in Europe and are due to come into effect in Canada and the United States in 2012. Maersk and the Civic Exchange, a public policy institution centered on environmental concerns, are urging other carriers to adopt low-sulfur diesel in Hong Kong by the end of this year under a voluntary industry charter.
“There is a developing regulatory regime and the whole industry is going to have to significantly up its game in all areas of environmental management,” Mr. Smith said. “We think it’s important that we have some sort of road map.”
The United Nations’ International Maritime Organization decided in 2008 that it would reduce the sulfur content of marine fuels from 4.5 percent to 0.5 percent globally by 2020, significantly capping shipping emissions. “That’s not a lot of time,” Mr. Smith said. “We don’t want to be in a situation where in 2019 everyone’s rushing to make themselves compliant. We’re quite keen to engage with governments to make sure that we have consistent regulation and that there’s a level playing field for carriers internationally.”
Hong Kong’s government has recognized the damage caused by marine emissions and commissioned a study from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, which it has cited as a precursor to new legislation. That institution is establishing an inventory of emissions from sea vessels, to be published in 2011. Civic Exchange has begun its own survey, scheduled for release in 2012, of the health effects of pollutants released by vessels in the Pearl River Delta.
A 2009 report led by James J. Corbett, a professor of marine policy at the University of Delaware, puts the number of annual deaths from global shipping emissions at 60,000.
Thus far, 15 shipping companies and two cruise lines have, in principle, signed on to the Fair Winds Charter, which was formally announced last month, agreeing to convert, for the next two years, to fuel with a 0.5 percent sulfur content or lower while docked in Hong Kong. Participating carriers — among them OOCL and APL, which already made the fuel switch in October — hope to have galvanized the Hong Kong and neighboring Guangdong governments into broader action by the end of the two-year period.
“Nowhere else do emissions from ships affect the public health of so many people,” said Veronica Booth of Civic Exchange, whose ultimate aim is to establish a low-emission zone in the Pearl River Delta. The region “has the largest population density, the most vessel traffic in close proximity to that population and the fewest effective controls.”
Participation rates among these container transportation lines are still unclear. Shipping companies will not necessarily convert all of their ships and they may not use the same fuel. But Maersk estimates that if all the vessels that the carriers operate were to adopt 0.1 percent low-sulfur fuel in Hong Kong, it could result in a reduction of sulfur and particulate matter emissions in excess of 80 percent.
There is a cost: Maersk, which makes about 850 port calls to Hong Kong annually, estimates that switching from relatively low-cost bunker fuel will cost it an additional $1 million a year.
Still, the company is eager to extend the initiative to other congested port cities in which residential neighborhoods are densely clustered along the coastline — and, eventually, to its runs at sea.
“Nowhere else in the world has industry had to lobby to be regulated,” Ms. Booth said. “This is an industry that understands where the global trend is headed.”
