Establishing a baseline, then setting achievable goals: Harvey Gulf and emissions monitoring

Harvey Gulf International Marine, an offshore vessel owner based in Louisiana, US, has attacked emissions from multiple fronts.

It operates platform supply vessels that are tri-fuelled, running on LNG, batteries and low-sulphur diesel fuel. And as the Green Seas podcast has reported, the shipowner has even used bio-LNG made from pig manure in those PSVs.

But it was its use of emissions monitoring technology that allowed it to develop an understanding of how to operate its vessels with those fuels in the least carbon-intense way.

Last year, Shane Guidry-led Harvey Gulf announced it had teamed up with SailPlan, a Florida-based technology company that has developed a real-time monitoring platform.

The shipowner then ran its vessel in different operating modes with various fuels to systematically test how emissions differed.

Dain Detellier, the company’s executive vice president of LNG operations, told our podcast in November that, for example, the company learned that running one engine at 80% rather than running two engines at lower power led to significantly lower methane emissions.

And he said the company was able to provide the vessel’s charterer with access to the real-time emissions.

“We wanted to really establish a good baseline of where we were as a company,” he said of the process. “That way we can establish goals that we know we’re going to be able to meet.”