Originally published on SeaNews

Can Digital Emissions Intelligence Help Ports Decarbonise Faster?

The Port of San Diego and PortXchange are testing a digital emissions platform designed to replace slow, costly inventories with faster, actionable insight. The two-year pilot could help ports identify pollution sources, assess clean-air investments and accelerate practical decarbonisation.

A new collaboration between the Port of San Diego and PortXchange aims to replace slow, resource-intensive emissions inventories with a faster digital system capable of guiding investment, tracking progress and identifying the next opportunities to reduce pollution.

Ports cannot reduce what they cannot measure.

Yet producing a detailed inventory of emissions from ships, trucks, locomotives and cargo-handling equipment can require months of data collection, analysis and reporting. By the time the findings are available, the operational picture may already have changed.

The Port of San Diego is attempting to address that problem through a two-year pilot with PortXchange, the latest company to join the port’s Blue Economy Incubator.

There are several major ports already operating emissions-inventory programmes, although their frequency and scope vary. Los Angeles and Long Beach publish annual inventories covering vessels, harbour craft, trucks, rail and cargo-handling equipment, using a shared methodology that improves comparability, while Oakland conducts similarly broad inventories periodically to guide clean-air investment. The Puget Sound ports use a regional inventory approximately every five years, alongside Seattle’s annual greenhouse-gas reporting, and Rotterdam combines annual emissions reporting with digital modelling of seagoing and inland shipping.

San Diego is therefore not the first port to measure emissions, but its collaboration with PortXchange is distinctive because it aims to automate data collection and analysis, reduce the time and cost of inventories, incorporate California-specific methods and convert historical reporting into more frequent forecasting and investment decision support.

At the centre of the project is PortXchange’s EmissionInsider platform, which will be adapted to help the port automate emissions calculations, integrate information from multiple transport modes and generate findings more quickly.

For the Port of San Diego, the objective is not simply to produce another environmental report. It is to create an emissions-intelligence capability that can influence investment and operational decisions while demonstrating whether existing clean-air measures are working.

Philip Gibbons, Deputy Director of Climate and Sustainability at the Port of San Diego, said a conventional emissions inventory can take the port approximately two years to complete.

“If we can use technology like PortXchange to make that more efficient and deliver cost savings, that is something we could do more often and hopefully with less expense over time,” he said.

An incubator built around real port problems

The Port of San Diego established its Aquaculture and Blue Technology Department approximately 11 years ago to identify environmental and economic opportunities connected with San Diego Bay.

Its Blue Economy Incubator subsequently emerged as a mechanism for helping technology companies test products in a working port environment.

Paula Sylvia, Director of Aquaculture and Blue Technology, explained that companies enter through a competitive process. The port and applicant then design a pilot project intended to address a defined environmental challenge or investigate a blue-economy opportunity.

Successful applicants enter into an agreement covering the project’s scope, key performance indicators and commercial terms. The port generally invests public money at the pre-seed stage and provides access to land, water, expertise and operating environments that may otherwise be difficult for a developing company to secure.

The aim is to create a credible case study capable of supporting commercialisation after the pilot.

PortXchange is the incubator’s 14th portfolio company. Sylvia said more than 70% of the companies supported through the programme have come from outside the United States, often because they are seeking to prove their technology in an American regulatory and commercial environment.

The relationship with PortXchange developed over several years. The organisations were initially connected through discussions involving PortXL in Rotterdam before re-engaging at an industry conference in Amsterdam.

Rather than purchasing an existing software product, the port invited PortXchange to enter the incubator process because the project would require additional development and close cooperation.

For PortXchange, that creates an opportunity to adapt EmissionInsider to San Diego’s requirements and incorporate capabilities that could later be offered to other ports.

Sylvia described this as the incubator’s ideal model: a company arrives with established technology, while the port provides the operational conditions and expertise needed to improve it for both local and wider markets.

From port-call efficiency to emissions intelligence

PortXchange developed from work originally undertaken within the Port of Rotterdam Authority.

The company initially concentrated on improving port-call efficiency by helping vessels, terminals and nautical service providers coordinate arrivals more effectively.

That work demonstrated a close relationship between efficiency and decarbonisation. Ships that can adjust their speed to a confirmed berth time, rather than rushing to port and waiting at anchor, can reduce fuel consumption and emissions.

PortXchange subsequently expanded into emissions measurement and carbon-intensity analysis.

“We are on a mission to help decarbonise the shipping industry,” Sjoerd de Jager, CEO and Founder of PortXchange, told SeaNews.

He said the company develops digital systems that help ports and shipping lines improve efficiency, reduce fuel consumption and support strategic decisions about decarbonisation.

San Diego presents a particularly valuable test environment. California ports have a long history of tracking air pollution and investing in cleaner freight technology, but they also operate within detailed state-level emissions methodologies that differ from approaches applied elsewhere.

PortXchange has previously worked with US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) methodologies. The San Diego pilot will require its platform to incorporate California’s additional air-quality requirements.

The port also has a distinctive operational profile. Alongside commercial cargo and cruise activity, San Diego Bay contains significant fishing and recreational-vessel traffic. Understanding whether those smaller vessel categories make a material contribution to the port’s emissions inventory will form part of the project.

Replacing spreadsheets with automated data flows

An emissions inventory requires information from several sources.

Vessel movements may be reconstructed through Automatic Identification System data, while engine characteristics, fuel type, operating mode and time spent at berth influence the resulting calculation.

Truck activity, rail movements and cargo-handling machinery require different datasets and methodologies. Some information may be publicly available, while other records must come from the port, terminal operators, tenants and transport companies.

Gibbons said the port has approximately 20 years of experience requesting operational data from its stakeholders. The collaboration is therefore not creating a new reporting obligation, but it may change how that information is collected.

The port wants to move away from spreadsheets and labour-intensive manual processes towards more efficient digital forms, automated data ingestion and repeatable calculations.

In an ideal scenario, much of the required information could be obtained from AIS, public databases and existing port records without repeatedly asking businesses to resubmit the same material.

PortXchange will examine how those flows can be automated while preserving the reliability of the existing inventory.

Speed will be one of the principal measures of success. Gibbons also identified accuracy, cost-effectiveness and the ability to reveal practical emissions-reduction opportunities as important performance indicators.

The digital results must remain comparable with inventories produced through the port’s established consultant-led methodology. Automation will have little value if it produces numbers more quickly but with lower confidence.

Managing gaps without creating false precision

Complete operational information is rarely available across every vessel, vehicle and piece of equipment.

PortXchange therefore expects to combine available records with modelling and machine-learning techniques that can estimate activity where data is incomplete.

However, the company does not believe success should be judged by producing increasingly precise-looking numbers.

The more important test is whether results are consistent between reporting periods, sufficiently reliable to reveal trends and capable of showing where intervention would have the greatest effect.

“It does not really matter how many digits behind the comma we are accurate,” Sjoerd said. “It is about the trend line going down and knowing where to focus.”

The first priority will be to confirm that the automated model produces results aligned with San Diego’s existing inventory. Once that baseline has been established, the port could begin generating updates more frequently and using forecasts to test future scenarios.

That could allow officials to model the emissions implications of a proposed terminal, forecast growth in vessel calls or estimate the effect of replacing a particular equipment category before committing investment.

Rather than spending the majority of their time assembling data, sustainability teams could devote more attention to interpreting it.

“The real value comes from using that insight and looking ahead,” Sjoerd said.

Finding the next intervention

The Port of San Diego adopted its Maritime Clean Air Strategy in 2021.

The strategy contains around 40 objectives intended to reduce pollution, improve local air quality and accelerate the adoption of cleaner maritime technology. Gibbons said around 80% of those objectives have been implemented in some form.

The port has introduced shore-power capability at its terminals and installed an emissions-capture system at the National City Marine Terminal. The system uses a bonnet positioned over a ship’s exhaust to reduce sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter.

Tenants have also adopted electric cargo-handling machinery. Two electric mobile harbour cranes, costing approximately $14 million in total, replaced one of the terminal’s largest sources of equipment emissions while increasing the port’s heavy-lift capability.

San Diego Bay is also home to Crowley’s battery-electric tug, described as the first fully electric tugboat operating in the United States.

The EmissionInsider project could help determine which intervention should come next.

An inventory may show, for example, that older terminal machinery accounts for a disproportionate share of pollution. That evidence could support a replacement programme or strengthen an application for public funding.

Vessel data could reveal that ships with older engine tiers are responsible for a significant portion of emissions. The port could then work with carriers to increase calls by newer and cleaner vessels.

“Every time we have done an inventory in the past, it is almost like a mini novel,” Gibbons said. “There are lots of stories within the data itself.”

The task is to identify where pollution originates and determine what the port can realistically do to influence it.