The greening of the seaports’ road logistics: environmental and energy impacts of alternative fuels scenarios for the Genoa port

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Abstract:

Seaports are a key logistic infrastructure playing a crucial role in the global supply chains, since the maritime industry carries around 90% of the volume of the global trade (Wang et al., 2023).
Seaport operators are also responsible for a large contribution to the global GHG emissions (Issa Zadeh, 2023), making the decarbonization of their activities of primary interest for the promotion of local and global environmental sustainability (Alzahrani et al., 2021).
While the greening of the seaport activities as a whole is a hot topic that has received huge attention in the literature (Jalali & Tei, 2024; Nikitakos, 2012), the sustainable transition of the road-based logistics in port areas is still an underrepresented and overlooked issue, which is gaining increasing attention among scholars.
In fact, the sustainability of the inland logistics is one fields of action for private and public actors involved in port-related activities to pursue green supply chain management (GSCM) objectives (Notteboom al., 2020) and can play a vital role in the promotion of a sustainable and intelligent governance of the city-ports (Novaresio et al., 2024).

While several studies have investigated the effects and potentialities of specific solutions for the greening of the seaports logistics operations, such as the energy-transport scheduling for green vehicles (Lu et al., 2023) and the use of direct road transports vs intermodal choices (Lättilä et al., 2013), the complexity of the challenge calls for more comprehensive approaches, including those based on the life-cycle assessment (LCA).
Similarly to Zamboni et al. (2024), our study adopts a “well-to-wheels” methodological approach (Figure 1) to quantify the current and future emissions and energy consumption scenarios, whose results are compared with those of a carbon footprint analysis based on the LCA developed by the Port Authority of Western Ligurian Sea.
Our approach consists in a three-step procedure estimating 1) the “well-to-tank”, 2) “tank-to-wheels” and 3) “well-to-wheels” emissions of 5 pollutants (CO, HC, NOX, SOX, PM) and 3 GHG (CO2, CH4, N2O) and energy consumption for the main classes of commercial vehicles entering the Genoa-Prà seaport area, specifically rigid trucks (RT), trailer trucks (TT) and articulated trucks (AT), considering their travelled distance and speed profile.

The present research builds upon Zamboni et al. (2015), who proposed a first experimental evaluation of heavy-duty vehicle speed patterns in urban and port areas to estimate their fuel consumption and exhaust emissions, but pursues two original goals: 1) to assess the current carbon and local emissions of commercial road vehicles usually circulating through one of the main terminals of the major Ligurian commercial seaport, namely Genoa-Prà, 2) to outline future scenarios of decarbonization using alternative fuels to meet the most recent European and international regulations (EU, 2024; Joung et al, 2020; IMO, 2018).

Our preliminary results reveal that heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) are mostly impactful in terms of NOx (68 kt per year in 2022) and CO2 (16 kt per year in 2022) equivalent emissions, which represent respectively 3.5% and 9% of the pollution generated by the passenger ships in the port of Genoa.
The most relevant share of these pollutant comes from the “tank-to-wheels” phase, which accounts 95% for NOx and 80% for CO2eq emissions, while the “well-to-tank” phase requires more than 17% of the energy produced by the shipping activities for touristic purposes, as Figure 2 shows.
These results compared to those of the benchmark analysis show higher levels of emissions by the HDV, both considering the “tank-to-wheels” phase alone and the overall “well-to-wheel” measure, highlighting an underestimation of the real environmental impact of this type of transports.
On top of this, our study aims to develop future traffic scenarios comparing the sustainability of using commercial vehicles fueled with liquefied natural gas (LNG) produced with fossil vs renewable sources and those powered with electric engines.
In the next step of the study, we will assess the emissions and energy consumption associated to the above-mentioned different type of fuels and technology, to quantify the amount of pollution, energy and economic savings that can be achieved with these solutions in the path to a net-zero port economy.

As seaports are crucial nodes of the international commercial and passenger networks and beating heart of their host cities, the decarbonization of logistics activities is a priority for the sustainability of the global and local supply chain.
This study, providing a comprehensive quantification of the present and future environmental impacts of road logistics in a historic European seaport, can help both policy makers, identifying the most impactful environmental parameters affecting road logistics operations, and logistics operators, signaling the most effective and fully sustainable technological solutions for the decarbonization of their fleet.