Review of the IMO initiatives for ship energy efficiency and their implications

This paper presents a review of the different International Maritime Organization (IMO) initiatives to improve the ship energy efficiency of new and existing ships, which is considered one of the essential tasks to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) in the maritime industry. First, the IMO effort and initiatives and the different indices suggested by the IMO are presented till the last version of the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC), showing the effect of different technologies on reducing the level of indices and the suggested improvement of the terms of indices in the next years. Second, the short- and long-term strategies suggested by the IMO are presented, showing that the effect of indices will be noticed in the short term, while the new fuels will show a significant improvement in the long term. Finally, several examples of cooperation between the different organizations are presented, showing that transferring knowledge and experience will significantly impact the maritime industry and thus lead to the concept of green ships in the near future. This paper shows that the combination of different solutions, the cooperation between stakeholders and the sharing of the data and information are important to achieve the required goal.