Solstad Joins the Climate Neutral Network

Solstad Offshore has for a long time focused on reducing emissions of polluting gasses, and last year, introduced the system, Solstad Green Operations (SGO). Through unique and innovative efforts on all levels of the organization, the crew uses this system to reduce the fleet’s fuel consumption by as much as 20%.

The Project Manager for SGO, is the offshore shipping company’s Environmental and Development Engineer, Tor Inge Dale and according to him it is this work which has led to the climate-neutral concept Climate Neutral Operations (CNO).

Saving money with climate neutrality
A green operation is a measure that saves the consumption of fuel. If a vessel manages to save minimum 500 liters of fuel in an environmental initiative, this is recorded as a green operation in the company’s environmental system. There are many ways that ships can streamline their environmental performance, and the crew onboard focuses their efforts on seven main categories of environmental saving. Not only is there environmental savings but there are also cost savings for the company’s customers.
The company now wants to extend these savings to bring their environmental work a step further.

- in this climate neutral concept we now want to invite our customers to use some of the cost savings from SGO on fuel on CNO, says Dale and elaborates:

In practice this means that our customers will be involved at three levels of the company’s environmental work:

1. The customer is given an overview of the ship’s CO2 accounts

2. Solstad Offshore introduces measures to reduce fuel consumption on the ship and for each SGO registered, there is a direct result in terms of reduced CO2, NOx and exhaust emissions. Moreover, the company pays the Norwegian Rainforest Foundation for the preservation of 1000 m2 of rainforest. The target is that each ship will carry out about 185 green operations each year, which will save 6.5 million m2 of rainforest which equals the quantity of CO2 produced by the company’s total emissions.

3. In collaboration with its customers, Solstad Offshore compensates for its emissions by investing in and supporting projects that are certified for CO2 cuts in accordance with the UN climate quotas.

- CNO is a breakthrough on the road to us becoming a climate-neutral company, and because of the savings from SGO it is actually more expensive for our customers to operate a ship without environmental measures than using a climate-neutral ship. This means that climate-neutral shipping is a commercially profitable measure we can introduce together with our customers, says Managing Director Lars Peder Solstad.

Big commitment
In 2010, Solstad and its employees, aims to complete about 6,500 green operations and save 6.5 million m2 of rainforest, as well as paving the way for the world’s first climate-neutral offshore shipping company.

-It’s our crew who are the company’s environmental heroes. Their competence and experience make these measures work effectively, says Lars Peder Solstad.

The Executive Director of the Rainforest Foundation, Lars Løvold, thinks Solstad Offshore’s project is very exciting and indicative of the company’s major commitment to the environment:

- Solstad Offshore, motivating their employees to reduce their own pollution in this way is itself praiseworthy, but when they link this to measures that preserve the rainforest on a global level this gives the project an extra dimension, says Løvold. He goes onto say that the Rainforest Foundation collaborates with the Norwegian Government and other companies on global conservation of the rainforests but that Solstad Offshore is currently the only shipping company that co-operate on forest conservation.

The environmental efforts of Solstad Offshore, have also been recognized on an international level. At the Sustainabale Shipping Awards 2010 in London, Solstad Offshore was nominated as one of the three shipping companies for the prize Shipping Green Initiative of the Year. On Tuesday afternoon the company is also invited to talk about its environmental work to Norway’s Ambassadors, and the Norwegian Minister of Environment and International Development, Erik Solheim, said in a statement that he is impressed by the shipping company’s environmental work. He thinks it is great that the company has taken the initiative to add a commercial viewpoint on such an important and forward-thinking environmental concept which is ahead of both current market and regulatory requirements.