Reaching Nordic net zero by 2050
calls for vastly accelerated action to decarbonize transportation.
It will require companies to move beyond traditional sector boundaries
and take ambitious actions on everything from technology choices,
investments and operational practices.
Today, I speak with leading senior executives
on what they believe are the green growth opportunities for the Nordics.
I'm Esben and welcome to Nordic Net Zero.
Today, the transport sector accounts for 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the Nordics.
The road to net zero is narrow, with significant investments
and high uncertainty.
But if the Nordics do it right, we have a 67 megaton reduction potential
and 180 times that globally.
To succeed in the green transition in our sector together with our partners,
I think it's important that we work together and we exchange
and that we have a common goal we are working towards.
So it's not only us as a shipyard who can really do the transition.
We need all the brains, all the partners with the good ideas
and we have to combine that.
And then we can also expand these ideas maybe to other industries.
The biggest opportunities are new ways of working
where we collaborate across sectors with the different stakeholders.
We have seen that people that we before considered competitors
we now need to partner with because we have the same ambitions
in terms of delivering the green solutions.
The main challenge for decarbonizing in the maritime industry is, of course,
that the technology is not available and you cannot buy them off the shelf.
We have to still develop them,
and we have to understand how to integrate them into a ship design.
And it has to make sense, of course.
The requirement that the transport industry has to the governments around Europe
is that they need to speed up
the availability of green electricity.
All of this transformation will go nowhere
if there is not much more electricity than currently planned.
We need quick decisions.
Plenty of availability of green electricity
so that when we rebuild our vessels to sail on ammonia,
the electricity that goes into producing the ammonia is additional capacity.
Not just something that is just shifted from consumer markets or other places.
We are of course also looking into the technology of fuel cells.
There’s really a big advantage in fuel cells, first of all it is zero emissions
and then there are a lot of things that are coming along with fuel cells
– you don’t have vibration, you don’t need pipes
and you can also decentralize the creation of energy in the ship.
So there are a lot of, so to say, advantages which comes along with the new technology.
The opportunities for DFDS with this transformation
is to offer a sustainable product that consumers like, that customers like,
and that my colleagues can see that we are taking an active role
in living up to the ambitions of the Paris agreement.
The green opportunities we see in our sector,
or for the Nordics in general,
is of course, that we are transforming in a whole industry
and it is about attracting people to work for us.
It's of course the responsibility we are taking.
And we are creating a network to work on solutions
to have a sustainable ship design on the market.
The Nordics have an opportunity to take international leadership on sustainable transportation.
Driving greenhouse gas emissions reductions at home and globally to reach net zero by 2050.
It's on us to accelerate the electrification of transport
and to ensure the supply of green fuels for the heaviest segments
in trucking, aviation and maritime.
At the same time, cross-sector collaboration is a must,
and the transition will require significant investments in infrastructure
to make the transition happen
and in the vast amounts of additional supply of renewable energy
to accommodate for those green fuels.
We see that this is not the one company show.
Being able to build a sustainable future cruise ships and passenger ships,
it's going to require a collaboration of multiple stakeholders,
like academia, like the network companies supplying different products for our ships,
and especially also our customers with whom we are working very closely.
We see that there are multiple solutions what we can utilize to decarbonization.
First of all, we want to seek for alternative fuels for our products to reduce the emissions.
Then we are also investigating alternative means for generating the energy.
Like the fuel cells.
And thirdly, we are always seeking for alternatives for our products
to consume less amount of energy.