Transporting oil across the North Sea is perilous... and the recent crash serves as a stark warning

While a major spillage off East Yorkshire was narrowly avoided, the incident serves as a reminder of the constant environmental threat posed by fossil fuel transport, writes Chris Wright

No-one likes Mondays, but last week’s dramatic North Sea collision was an especially horrible start to the week, raising fears that 220,000 barrels of jet fuel could spill across the coast, causing an environmental disaster in one of the UK’s most ecologically sensitive marine regions.

Just miles away, rare seabird colonies, grey seals, and critical fish habitats in Flamborough Head and Holderness sat in the path of a potential spill – one that could choke marine life, taint food sources at a time when the birds were entering their breeding season, and throw a protected region’s delicate ecosystem off balance.

The disaster was largely averted this time. The company managing the oil tanker involved said that only one of 16 cargo tanks on the MV Stena Immaculate was ruptured, but the environmental risks remain. The clean-up will take weeks, and the full impact may not be understood for months.

But there’s a bigger picture we can’t ignore. This North Sea crash may have grabbed headlines, but shipping incidents, many of them involving fossil fuels, happen far more often than most people realise, and they are a constant, underreported threat to marine life and coastal communities. In fact, the British Isles has become a global hotspot for maritime accidents.

Over the last decade, just under 20 per cent of all shipping incidents around the world were within the waters of the British Isles. In 2023 alone, there were 695 incidents across the British Isles, making that close to two major incidents a day.

Around the world, most of these incidents are caused by mechanical damage and rarely make the headlines. But there are still thousands of collisions, and close to four major fires at sea every week. Last year alone, 10,000 tonnes of oil spilled into the ocean, pushing up the total loss over the last decade to 185,000 tonnes of oil.

While you may not be able to remember any of these incidents, that's the equivalent of five Exxon Valdez spills over the last decade alone.

However, outside of headline incidents with oil tankers, it's very hard to assess the real environmental damage of shipping incidents worldwide. In 2022, Canadian researchers estimated that, on top of major oil spills, there has likely been at least one major container ship accident every week for the last decade that has caused a significant maritime impact.

That’s before we even begin to account for their impact on the atmosphere. Shipping accounts for about 3 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it’s simply going in the wrong direction. Global CO2 emissions from shipping have gone up by 41 per cent since 2000, as the pure weight of cargo shipped by containers worldwide increased nearly 20-fold since the 1980s.

Decarbonising this global trade is going to be a mammoth feat in itself. In 2023, the shipping industry set a goal to reach net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050.

To do that, though, the industry estimates that over 3,500 ships need to be built or retrofitted for cleaner fuels every year for the next 25 years. That’s almost 10 ships a day, and will cost close to $2 trillion.

So far, change has been slow. The main focus has been to blend the thick, unrefined “bunker fuels” the industry commonly uses with alternatives like biodiesel, methane gas, methanol, or ammonia. However, biofuels made up less than 1 per cent of the industry’s fuel consumption in 2022 and last year, only 14 per cent of new shipping tonnage even had the capacity to be “alternative fuel-ready”.

That may change soon, as Clarkson Research notes that ships that can run on “alternative fuels” made up half of all the new ship-building orders last year. However, the most popular “alternative” right now are ships that run on methane gas. Not exactly a great climate alternative.

Last year, Cornell University researcher Robert Howarth suggested that if we were to slightly reconsider the estimated rate of methane leakage when we freeze, process, ship, and unfreeze liquefied methane gas around the world, it could be as bad or worse for the climate than burning coal.

That is unless we somehow reduce the amount of things ships carry around the world. In 2023, the biggest driver of growth in global maritime trade was driven by fossil fuels.

In fact, of the 109,000 big merchant ships carrying goods around the world’s oceans, about 7,500 of them are oil tankers. These tankers are so big, though, they make up 28 per cent of the global weight of goods shipped around the world.

Then there’s all the ships carrying coal and gas. There were around 1.38 billion tonnes of coal shipped around the world in 2023, and 144 million tonnes of liquefied gas.

This gas share might not sound like much, but it’s rapidly on the rise, and new liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers currently make up over half of all new shipping capacity orders around the world.

So, what does all of that mean? In 2022, Nishan Degnarain, chair of the London School of Economics' Ocean Finance Initiative, estimated that close to 40 per cent of the weight of all goods shipped around the world could be linked to fossil fuels. Based on these 2023 figures, it’s certainly over a third.

That’s an incredible amount of bunker fuel, shipbuilding and oil spills we could save if we replaced fossil fuels with renewable energy.

This is especially the case when you consider that a study by the International Energy Agency found that importing clean technologies provides a durable stock of energy equipment, resulting in greater efficiency, while fossil fuel supplies need to be replenished as soon as they are consumed. “A single journey by a large container ship filled with solar PV modules can provide the means to generate the same amount of electricity as the natural gas from more than 50 large LNG tankers or the coal from more than 100 large bulk ships,” the report said.

So, if you woke up this week in horror at the scenes of fires burning off the coast of Hull, and you’re wondering what you can do: go test-drive an electric car, inquire about a heat pump, or call a tradie to ask about a solar panel for your house.

Each one of these small steps may be miles away from the North Sea collision, but they’re the best thing you and your family can do to stop that from happening next time.