TACOMA TIDEFLATS, Blair Waterway — The deep blue, rust-stained cargo ship Midnight Sun rolled in, ready to refuel and load up for a journey to Anchorage.
This was an ordinary maritime scene on Puget Sound, but the two gargantuan green fuel tanks on the ship’s deck were unique. They held an odorless, colorless fossil fuel called liquefied natural gas, or LNG, that some say could help the global shipping industry reduce climate-warming emissions.
The Midnight Sun is one of two ships owned by TOTE Maritime Alaska, the only maritime company buying LNG from Puget Sound Energy. The state’s largest private utility built the plant and an 8 million-gallon storage drum on the shore of Commencement Bay.
This facility, now 2 years old, takes the same kind of gas you might ignite to heat your home or cook a meal and chills it to a liquid. In this form, LNG — composed of mostly methane — occupies 600 times less volume than its gaseous form and can power ships like the Midnight Sun carrying groceries and other goods all the way to Alaska.
PSE’s LNG facility is an example of industries at a crossroads, raising questions about how to reduce emissions now and in the future amid a warming climate. Should an investor-owned utility be making new investments in fossil fuels as it is already being forced to clean up its energy mix? And should a shipping company, exempt from many of Washington state’s policies aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, go all in on yet another fossil fuel?
With battery power now unrealistic for big ships, LNG has emerged as a contending fuel for reducing local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions because it is cleaner than the diesel and so-called bunker fuels in widespread use.
Fueling ships with natural gas would cut emissions by about 25%, according to Don MacKenzie, a University of Washington professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Sulfur oxide emissions from LNG engines are reduced by more than 95%, nitrogen oxides emissions by as much as 80% and particulate emissions containing air toxics by over 90% when compared to conventional fuels, said Dennis McLerran, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator for the region spanning the Pacific Northwest.
But when comparing emissions from alternative fuels, you need to consider emissions from the moment the gas is collected from the earth to the end use, said Fred Felleman, who served on Gov. Jay Inslee’s Maritime Innovation Advisory Council and is a commissioner for the Port of Seattle.
Natural gas may leak methane from the wellhead, or on the pipeline it’s moved through. And because LNG expands as it warms up, some shipping companies need to vent it while en route.
Inslee, the Puyallup Tribe and climate advocates argue there’s no room to be building new fossil fuel facilities that contribute to local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, especially in pollution-overburdened communities amid a climate emergency. Others question what a utility is doing in the shipping fuel business at all.
PSE, which relies on coal and gas-fired power plants for about half of its energy generation, must undergo one of the largest clean energy transitions in a state with some of the most aggressive climate policies in the nation. Yet here on the ancestral lands of the Puyallup people, the utility is permitted to produce about 250,000 gallons of LNG each day. Most of it flows to a nearby dock to fuel the cargo fleet, while the remainder can heat about 85,000 homes during a cold snap, according to PSE.
Is it a solution for a cleaner future? Not really, but the company sees it as a positive development.
“It’s better to make a small step forward than to do nothing, and wait 20 years for technology to catch up,” said Ron Roberts, senior vice president of energy resources for PSE. “This is incrementally better. It’s like buying a hybrid.”
How PSE got in the LNG game
Fifteen years ago, PSE identified LNG as the most cost-effective option to help meet demand from its natural gas customers on cold winter days, Roberts said.
The Commencement Bay facility, including an intricate web of pipes, a roaring compressor engine and the equivalent of a supersize Stanley thermos, came online in 2022.
It was a year after the Legislature passed the landmark Climate Commitment Act, putting a price on carbon emissions across the economy, and a few years after the Clean Energy Transformation Act, charting a path toward carbon-free electricity generation by 2045.
The fracked methane gas from British Columbia flows from the Williams Northwest Pipeline into a network of pipes. When it arrives at Commencement Bay, carbon dioxide and sulfur are pulled from the gas before it’s cooled to a liquid and stored. The rest of the gas is flared into the atmosphere.
PSE maintains that gas is a steppingstone, especially for the shipping industry.
Work by the Environmental Protection Agency has led to new engine standards and filters that have reduced truck and train emissions by as much as 90%. But big ships are a more challenging issue, and their emissions have far-reaching implications, McLerran said. These ships travel internationally, passing West Coast communities along the way, some of which, despite having no port, saw impacts on air quality and local health.
Port communities experience disproportionate health risks, like childhood asthma and other diseases related to exposures to air pollution.
LNG was among the first alternatives to diesel or bunker fuels that emerged, McLerran said. Bunker, or heavy fuel oil, is a tarlike fuel produced as a remnant of the petroleum fuel refining process.
TOTE Maritime Alaska in 2012 announced it would convert some of its ships in response to the EPA’s goals. And in 2020, an International Maritime Organization requirement went into effect, mandating a drastic reduction in the sulfur content in ship fuels.
Researchers estimated the cleaner marine fuel standards would result in reductions in premature deaths linked to poor air quality exposures, and childhood asthma rates.
LNG is sold to maritime customers by Puget LNG, a subsidiary of Puget Sound Energy’s parent company. PSE has plans to keep the LNG facility humming for about 40 years.
“LNG is the cleanest most available fuel for the shipping industry,” TOTE Maritime Alaska President Alex Hofeling said. “It provides significant public health and environmental benefits.”
The company invested more than $100 million to convert two ships — North Star and Midnight Sun — to run on liquefied natural gas. The ships make about 40 to 50 trips between Tacoma and Anchorage each year.
According to a 2023 United Nations report, about 1.2% of the global shipping fleet are using alternative fuels, mainly LNG, and to a lesser extent, batteries, liquefied petroleum gas and methanol.
Greenhouse gas emissions from the world’s maritime fleet increased by nearly 5% from 2020 to 2021, as the world reemerged from pandemic lockdowns, with most of the increase coming from container ships, dry bulk carriers and general cargo vessels, according to the U.N.
The fleet’s average age is also rising, according to U.N. data. Ships are getting older partly due to shipowners’ uncertainty about future technological developments and the most cost-efficient fuels, as well as about changing regulations and carbon prices, the U.N. stated in a 2022 report.
Even today, Hofeling said, if TOTE was considering cleaner alternatives, it would likely again land on LNG. But the company may not have converted its ships if PSE wasn’t also planning to open its LNG facility in Tacoma, he said.
Are there any renewable alternatives?
Natural gas is often touted as a transitional fuel from petroleum-based fuels to whatever comes next. And the U.S. has emerged as the world’s largest producer and exporter of natural gas.
While earlier this year President Joe Biden paused permitting for new LNG export facilities, LNG production capacity is set to nearly double by 2030 because of projects currently under construction.
In uses on land, research indicates natural gas can be just as harmful to the atmosphere as coal when accounting for methane leaks. In shipping-fuel uses too, the full scope of greenhouse gas emission reductions are hard to quantify because methane — a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide — may leak as it is transported via pipeline, chilled to a liquid, and as it expands while aboard ships en route.
For maritime shipping companies, there aren’t really any large-scale alternatives to diesel and bunker fuels in shipping today, said MacKenzie, the UW professor.
LNG, liquefied petroleum gas, methanol, biofuel and hydrogen have emerged as contenders to play a role between traditional fossil fuels and whatever comes next. There are also emerging technologies like big batteries, fuel cell systems, wind-assisted propulsion and ammonia produced using hydrogen from renewable sources, but nothing has been deployed at scale.
Washington has plans to build all-electric ferries, like those operating in Norway, but this battery technology is not yet viable for transoceanic shipping, MacKenzie said. The weight and volume of batteries needed for such a long voyage would eat up all of the cargo capacity, and more.
Fossil fuels are hard to beat in this context, MacKenzie said; they carry a huge amount of energy per unit of space and weight, and they are liquids at normal temperatures and pressures, so they are easy and cheap to store and move around.
Without government intervention and incentives, nobody wants to go first in the pursuit of alternative fuels, said Felleman, the Port of Seattle commissioner.
Meanwhile, Danish shipping giant Maersk last year completed its first voyage fueled by methanol carrying Amazon shipping containers from Shanghai to Rotterdam, Netherlands.
“Because Amazon has enough commercial clout with the number of materials they ship, all of the sudden methanol ships are being built,” Felleman said. “That is the most encouraging thing in terms of time frame for change.”
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