Shipping is a significant air pollution source in ports and coastal areas. Recently, air quality has become a severe problem in many countries, and the interest to calculate and determine the emission values of the ships crossing the coastal area or harbors has increased.
The current investigation aims to quantify ship exhaust emissions and their contribution to local atmospheric air pollution in the Suez Canal area. The study is performed to evaluate the relevance of shipping as an air polluter, and predict the overall emissions rate from international ships in the canal. Therefore, the annual emissions are calculated for individual vessels of various types transiting the Canal. The annual average number of ships crossing the canal is about 15000 ships. The emissions during sailing in the channel are distinguished during different scenarios and modes of ship operation. The machinery exhaust emissions in the forms of nitrogen oxides (NOX), sulfur oxides (SOX), carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), and unburned hydrocarbons (UHC) are reported. Two international marine emissions inventories are used in the present calculations. The first method is the US Environmental Protection Agency model (EPA), while the European model (ENTEC) is used for the comparison and verification. Empirical functions and correlations are predicted and derived for different ship types, to simplify the ship emission calculations using the data available of about 15000 ships per year which selected and collected from Suez Canal database.
The study indicated that Suez Canal is receiving annually several thousands of pollutant tonnes with a potential increase in the future and the container vessels are the main source of air pollution amongst the different types of vessel. Also, the total emissions values appear to be consistently higher in EPA model than the corresponding values in ENTEC model.