Moving decarbonisation from lab to industry

According to the Global Centre for Maritime Decarbonisation (GCMD)’s Chief Executive Officer, Professor Lynn Loo, the energy transition is hard but “that’s no reason to not do anything about it.”

GCMD is a non-profit organisation that supports decarbonisation in the maritime industry through pilots and trials.

It was founded by six industry partners, namely BHP, BW Group, Eastern Pacific Shipping, Foundation Det Norske Veritas, Ocean Network Express and Seatrium, and receives funding from the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) for selected research and development programmes. 

Hapag-Lloyd, bp, and NYK Line have since joined as strategic partners as well.

It’s no easy feat to run a relatively young (three-year-old) non-profit pushing for decarbonisation in one of the world’s most mature industries.

GCMD was set up during the Covid-19 pandemic, and Loo shares with GovInsider that she hired her first team members while in quarantine.

This being her first maritime venture, she had plucked up the courage to share about the organisation’s mission at Marine Money, the industry’s go-to event.

With a chemical engineering background, Loo spent most of her professional career in research and academia at Princeton University.

Translating research into impact

For a scientist like Loo, controlling the variables would have been key to conducting an experiment.

What about moving experiments from one-off trials to industry-accepted practices?

For organisations to sustain the practices even after initial pilots, she says that experiments cannot be implemented in an isolated laboratory setting. Instead, they must be embedded in the industry environment – in GCMD’s case, they are implemented on vessels or ports.

“We try very hard to do our pilots without disrupting our partners’ commercial operations [because] when our pilots are done and we have specific findings and recommendations, it’s easier for them to take it forward in their daily commercial operations,” she explains.

Their goal is to lower adoption barriers of low to zero-carbon solutions, she says. This is why GCMD hews as closely to the industry’s terms as possible.

When it comes to moving the needle, it’s also not about “being louder than anyone in the room.”

Use science to your advantage. At the end of the day, people are convinced by technical knowledge and how it is conveyed to them, she notes.

For now, it is still early days to gauge success, but Loo says that success of the pilots can be measured by observing if the practices continue to propagate in the industry even when GCMD eventually steps away.

GovInsider recently covered what GCMD is doing to build the industry’s capabilities to prepare for energy transition policies.

Working with more than 100 partners

Considering the integral role of shipping within other sectors across the supply chain, GCMD has more than 100 unique partners, including those in oil and gas, energy, finance, standards development, and tech.

Giving an example of a pilot for the maritime industry inspired by projects in other sectors, Loo shares that GCMD is trialing a pay-as-you-save financing model with ship operators.

This is a model where third-party financiers provide funding to ship operators to install energy-efficient upgrades. Payback to the financier is pegged to the energy savings realised over time.

This creates a shared risk-and-reward model between ship operators and financiers, with all parties benefitting from lower energy consumption while the building’s value increases.

According to shipping and maritime news TradeWinds, the pilot has since seen strong interest from financial and legal stakeholders.

How non-profits can engage the industry

Loo points to three ways for non-profits to engage industry: Engage broadly with more partners beyond the maritime sector; listen intently to industry pain points; and balance consultation and conviction.

Additionally, pilot projects should tackle pain points and be practical enough for the industry to implement.

“The conversation needs to be grounded. I think it’s about us acknowledging that [decarbonisation] is complex…

“It's about being pragmatic. We need to understand that at the end of the day, if people can't make money, let's stop talking about it.”

While the ability to consult and manage multiple stakeholders is a good skill to have in advocacy, she shares that it is important to balance consultation with the conviction to drive efforts.

"Being in industry has taught me a new level of urgency because time impacts the commercial bottom line. In academia, one can afford to take the time to examine deeply and rigorously without the need to worry about the bottom line,” she says.

A scientist’s calling in management

Her passion to translate research into impact precedes her time at GCMD.

During her teaching career, Loo was thrust into various leadership roles to run the faculty and later, the Princeton-based Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.

In these strategic roles, she found her calling in management, where she could tap on skills to “see the big picture” and “explain things in an easy-to-understand way to bring everybody along.”

“I found that leadership roles have been very satisfying in a different way,” she says.

It was during her time as the research and education centre director that she had to “figure out how the different research done by the faculty members would fit into the bigger energy ecosystem and how collective impact is created.”

During this stint, she led the Net-Zero America study, which lays out five technological pathways to achieving net-zero emissions in the US by 2050.

The report was submitted to the Biden administration, and the research methodology was adopted by other academic institutions around the world conducting similar studies for other countries, according to a press release by the Princeton University.