GREENING THE OPERATION OF THE ARLEIGH BURKE-CLASS (DDG-51) VESSEL UNDER CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIOS: A COST AND EMISSIONS PERSPECTIVE

Since its inception in 1991, the DDG-51 naval class vessel continues to be a workhorse for the US Navy. In the coming three decades, naval performance is expected to be influenced by climate change. We would like to investigate whether the current marine diesel run vessel will benefit from retrofitting any other technology to tackle climate change impact and contribute to a greener operation. We argue that substituting diesel with methane gas while retrofitting with air lubrication can indeed lend help to this effort. More technically, drawing inspiration from maritime logistics, we arrive at our conclusion that the conventional diesel run DDG-51 naval vessel with air lubrication will offer similar CO2 per ton nautical mile emissions and related costs per ton nautical mile like the environmentally better methane gas fuel run without air lubrication. We thus conclude that the methane gas run vessel with air lubrication is better than diesel run vessel with air lubrication. This conclusion is shown to be valid via a climate scenario projection for three decades into the future.