Navigating the Complexity of Maritime Decarbonization

As a key player in maritime logistics, Wilson Sons operates in one of the most challenging sectors of decarbonization. The industry’s reliance on fossil fuels, typical in a hard-to-abate sector, coupled with the high costs and long lifespans of assets like vessels and tugboats, creates significant hurdles to reducing emissions. Additionally, each asset—such as a tugboat or vessel - has its operational profile, requiring tailored solutions to ensure feasibility. The variability of operational demands means that technologies like electrification, biofuels, and green fuels needed to be assessed for individual assets, further complicating decarbonization planning.

Wilson Sons recognized the need to establish a robust and repeatable process for defining a decarbonization or climate transition plan that could guide their efforts now and in the future. This process needed to address both the technical and financial viability of projects while accommodating the rapidly evolving technology landscape and market uncertainties, such as fluctuating carbon pricing. Without a clear framework, the company risked investing in cost-ineffective solutions or overlooking viable projects critical to achieving its decarbonization goals.

Stakeholders have also placed mounting pressure on Wilson Sons, particularly since the Paris Agreement, to disclose transparent decarbonization strategies, with specific reporting obligations to CDP, S&P, TCFD, and ICO2 B3. Despite the company’s commitment, the absence of a unified, standardized project evaluation and prioritization process hindered meaningful progress toward emission reduction. Wilson Sons needed a solution that could provide both a high-level overview and a granular analysis of their climate transition strategy, enabling them to evaluate and prioritize emission abatement opportunities effectively. This approach needed to integrate growth assumptions and allow for ongoing updates, ensuring their decarbonization strategy remains adaptable, actionable, and aligned with long-term goals.

Selecting a Comprehensive Decarbonization Partner

Considering their business complexity in a hard-to-abate sector, Wilson Sons started looking for a software solution that could support them in building a decarbonization strategy that was both robust and adaptable. They needed a platform that could support the development of a long-term strategic plan while remaining flexible to accommodate future updates and evolving goals. Wilson Sons chose SINAI’s Decarbonization Intelligence platform for its comprehensive approach to evaluating and prioritizing emission reduction opportunities while considering both environmental and financial metrics. This feature was essential for Wilson Sons to develop a strategic and actionable decarbonization plan.

Collaborative Modeling for Asset-Level Decarbonization

To tackle their decarbonization challenges, Wilson Sons and SINAI developed a decarbonization strategy tailored to the operational complexity of maritime logistics, which was based on promising technologies in the industry alongside projects they already had in their pipeline. Together, SINAI and Wilson Sons identified and modeled over 600 decarbonization projects across 14 categories, including biofuels, electrification, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and green fuels.

Each vessel and tugboat was treated as an individual asset, with SINAI enabling the detailed analysis of their unique operational profiles. By doing so, they were able to identify the most feasible technologies for each asset, considering factors such as usage patterns, maintenance schedules, and cost-effectiveness technologies. SINAI’s Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MACC) methodology was used to evaluate the technical and financial viability of these opportunities.

This granular and collaborative approach allowed Wilson Sons to prioritize projects that would deliver the highest impact for each asset while aligning with their long-term business objectives. By automating data consolidation and scenario analysis, the SINAI platform reduced the time required to build a comprehensive roadmap. Within just four weeks, Wilson Sons had a clear and actionable decarbonization strategy that accounted for both technical and financial feasibility across their diverse fleet and operations. By digitizing this work, their sustainability and engineering teams did not have to invest resources into testing decarbonization strategies that were not aligned with the business goals. By narrowing down the most promising technologies, Wilson Sons has increased the efficiency of the investment decision-making process, saving months of manual work.

Building a Scalable and Transparent Decarbonization Strategy

Through their collaboration with SINAI, Wilson Sons has achieved significant milestones in their decarbonization journey. The ability to model 600 decarbonization opportunities across 14 categories in just four weeks drastically improved the efficiency of the process, saving months of manual analysis and preventing the need to deploy CAPEX to test out decarbonization strategies with their assets. The projects were modeled at the asset level, with a detailed focus on the unique operational profiles of each vessel and tugboat. This approach allowed the company to pinpoint the most feasible technologies for specific assets, ensuring precision and relevance in project selection.

With the insights generated, Wilson Sons can now confidently define reliable decarbonization targets. This enabled the company to avoid cost-ineffective investments and focus on projects that aligned with both financial and environmental goals. Additionally, the roadmap provided a strategic framework to guide future planning, helping the company adapt to evolving market conditions, such as carbon pricing and new regulatory requirements. Wilson Sons' next step is to use this roadmap to plan their emission reduction target and get budget approval to implement these projects.