Compliance Calculations & Life-Cycle Emissions

A 50,000 dwt product tanker burned 6,100 tonnes of VLSFO and 1,150 tonnes of MGO over 62,000 nautical miles in 2026. Weighted by energy, that mix attains a FuelEU greenhouse-gas intensity of 91.59 gCO2eq/MJ against a limit of 89.34, which is a deficit of about 353 tonnes of CO2 equivalent and a penalty of EUR 225,600. Run the very same twelve months of fuel through the draft IMO Net-Zero Framework at its 2028 targets, on the IMO's own emission factors, and the ship is above both of them: it owes 3,592 tonnes of Tier 1 remedial units and 1,532 tonnes of Tier 2, roughly US$941,000 more. One fuel mix, one engine, two bills, and neither instrument yet says whether either is netted against the other.

The same records answer two more questions, and disagree with themselves each time. Total CO2 for the year is 22,682 tonnes, which over 3.10 billion capacity tonne-miles gives an attained CII of 7.317 against a required 6.352, a D. Fifty-three per cent of the fuel was burned inside the European scope, giving 12,012 tonnes of CO2 and, at EUR 75 an allowance, an ETS invoice of EUR 900,900. Four numbers, four verdicts, none of them convertible into another, because each regime counts a different quantity over a different boundary: mass of CO2 per transport work, tonnes inside a geographic scope, grams of CO2 equivalent per megajoule well to wake, and the same kind of intensity worldwide on the IMO's own factors.

That one ship carries all eight lessons. The first sets the four regimes side by side on her year so the differences are arithmetic rather than rhetoric. Two lessons then build the life-cycle method the intensity figures rest on: the four phases of an ISO 14040 study and the decisions each one takes, the functional unit that quietly ranks two fuels differently per megajoule than per tonne-mile, the GWP100 against GWP20 choice that decides whether LNG looks good, and then the system boundary itself, well to tank against tank to wake, the refinery allocation convention that moves the upstream term by more than most efficiency measures do, and the gap between a regulatory default value and a certified actual one.

Four lessons work the money end to end: the attained and required CII and the band edges that turn them into a letter; the ETS scope split, the phase-in and the surrender chain, with the sensitivity to the allowance price shown; the FuelEU balance, its penalty formula and the size of the certified bio parcel that would close the gap; and pooling, banking and borrowing treated as the market they have become, with a worked three-ship pool and the question of who owns a surplus the charterer's fuel created. The last lesson does the IMO framework as pure arithmetic: the attained GFI, the two targets, the two tiers of remedial unit, and where a ship can be compliant under one regime and not the other.

By the end you should be able to take a fleet's own bunker and distance data and produce every one of these numbers yourself, show your working to a verifier, and say which operational lever moves which number and by how much. Be warned that this is the fastest-moving material in the Academy: several of the constants are drawn from instruments that are approved but not adopted, the published sources contradict each other in places, and every lesson says where its position was taken from and what you should re-check before quoting it to a charterer. The opening lesson is free to read as a sample. It is the middle course of the Performance and the Money specialisation, and holding all three is what opens the specialisation's capstone.