Developing a Fuel Efficiency Index for Small Sized Marine Vessels

International Maritime Organization (IMO) has adopted the energy efficiency design index (EEDI) regulation to limit greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from medium and large ships. However, small ships, boats and leisure watercrafts with load line length below 24m or deadweight tonnage (DWT) below 2000 DWT are not bound by the EEDI regulation. These small vessels exist in large numbers and there is a great scope to reduce GHG emissions from these watercrafts. This short opinion paper proposes an approach to evaluate the GHG emissions performance of small watercrafts that fall outside IMO regulation. To this end, a novel index termed small watercraft index is proposed by adapting the existing EEDI for different categories of small watercrafts. The approach proposed here helps standardise the evaluation of small watercrafts and may provide policy inputs for sub-IMO crafts. Furthermore, the proposed approach aids performance comparison of different small watercrafts.