Marine Benchmark data showed dry bulk carriers leading shipping’s efficiency race, as Lookout Maritime urged owners to treat performance intelligence as a strategic asset
Bulk carrier owners were urged to treat performance data as a core strategic asset, as Marine Benchmark managing director Torbjörn Rydbergh set out a detailed picture of the sector’s carbon and utilisation trends to 2030 at Riviera’s International Bulk Shipping Conference 2025 in London.
Presenting in Session 1, Safety, security and regulatory readiness for 2030, Mr Rydbergh described Marine Benchmark’s “digital twin of global shipping”, built from S&P Global fleet records and AIS, which runs bottom-up fuel consumption and cargo calculations for every vessel each night on a 32-server cluster.
He said the platform effectively carried out “a greenhouse gas study on every vessel” every day, allowing users to slice results by segment, trade, owner and propulsion type.
Using bulk carriers and general cargo ships as an example, he showed that absolute CO2 emissions had risen since 2012, but tonne-miles had grown faster, indicating an efficiency gain.
Mr Rydbergh said the bulk sector was “one of the best when it comes to energy efficiency”, with CO2 per tonne-mile trending lower than in other major segments.
Growth had concentrated in the Newcastlemax, Kamsarmax and Ultramax trades, while some traditional sizes showed static or declining transport work.
Speed and port behaviour were central to those gains and across large bulker classes, average steaming speeds had fallen by about 1.5 knots over the period, but average distance sailed per day had been maintained.
