While much of the focus on shipping decarbonisation has been on alternative fuels, one company is examining ways to capture CO2 on board vessels.
Friends Christiaan Nijst and Maarten Lodewijks established Value Maritime in 2017 in Rotterdam to make shipping more sustainable with solutions that bring valuable green and financial dividends.
They began by engineering a scrubber into an advanced exhaust gas cleaning system known as the Filtree, and then during the Covid-19 pandemic, Nijst found time to develop the carbon capture feature, which removes and stores carbon from the vessel’s exhaust gases in fixed onboard storage such as tanks or removable storage containers.
The CO2 is then taken to the end-users such as greenhouses, which have the equipment to remove it and use it to enhance crop growth. It can also be reused to enrich future fuels such as methanol for dual-fuel vessels.
Nijst is known as the inventor and the technical “clever clogs”: he won the Nor-Shipping 2022 Young Entrepreneur Award.
His background is in petrochemical engineering and he worked for many years in engineering and process positions at Shell, including strategy adviser to the European refineries for the IMO 2020 change.
Lodewijks, in contrast, is “a numbers guy”. He believes that to achieve sustainable shipping, you need “more than a good idea”. There also has to be a financial dividend and ultimately the business solution needs to be profitable.
Lodewijks brings his shipping company knowledge and financial acumen to the enterprise and teaches the team the importance of “knowing the numbers”.
The duo recently established the Value Group, which includes Value Maritime and Value Carbon to handle the complete land-based carbon value chain from offloading to storage.
The concept already has the backing of one of the biggest names in shipping. Eastern Pacific Shipping installed a system on a managed MR tanker that it hopes will cut emissions by 40%.
