10 of the world’s busiest 13 ocean freight lanes cut CO2 emissions in Q1 2023

The latest industry analysis from Xeneta shows that CO2 emissions from the container industry fell during the first quarter of 2023 across 10 of the world’s busiest 13 ocean freight lanes. According to the Carbon Emissions Index (CEI), a unique environmental benchmarking tool from Xeneta and Marine Benchmark, the trade corridor making the biggest emissions inroads was the US West Coast to the Far East lane, while Yang Ming emerged as the industry’s ‘emissions hero’ for the second consecutive quarter.
 
The CEI is built on a foundation of real-time AIS data and individual vessel specifications, allowing it to track and calculate environmental performance per ton of cargo carried across the sector’s busiest trade routes. It uses a baseline score of 100 to assess carriers in relation to the trade lane average at the start of 2018.
 
The US West Coast to the Far East lane (a backhaul) saw a speed reduction of almost 1 knot, which, when combined with an increase in vessel sizes and a stable filling factor, enabled a 11.3% CEI improvement from Q4 2022.
 
Xeneta’s data shows that only three trades increased speeds across the quarter, and that all were fronthaul routes, namely; from the Far East to North Europe and to the US East Coast, and from North Europe to the US East Coast. Of the 13 leading corridors the only ones to show an increase in quarterly CEI scores, and therefore emissions, were North Europe to the Far East and to the US East Coast, and from the Mediterranean to the US East Coast.
 
Despite the favorable current trend, there’s a mixed long-term perspective, with four trades actually recording worse CEI scores in Q1 2023 than in Q1 2018. The Mediterranean to US East Coast trade is “bottom of the barrel” with a 13.6% higher CEI. At the other end of the scale, the “star performer” is the Far East to the US East Coast corridor, with a 21.2% improvement for the same period.
 
The best individual carrier, Stausbøll concludes, is Yang Ming, which also recorded the best CEIs in Q4 2022. The Taiwanese giant was the cleanest carrier (when measured by CO2 emitted per ton of cargo carried) on three trades, with OOCL and HMM securing the top spot on two trades a piece.

Xeneta is the leading ocean and air freight rate benchmarking and market analytics platform transforming the shipping and logistics industry. Xeneta’s powerful reporting and analytics platform provides liner-shipping stakeholders the data they need to understand current and historical market behavior – reporting live on market average and low/high movements for both short and long-term contracts. Xeneta’s data is comprised of over 350 million contracted container and air freight rates and covers over 160,000 global ocean trade routes and over 40,000 airport-airport connections. Xeneta is a privately held company with headquarters in Oslo, Norway and regional offices in New York and Hamburg.