Which of the shipping consortia active in the services segment will achieve greater savings in the carbon tax payments under EU ETS, the EU's emissions trading system European Union, which since the beginning of this year has been extended to the Shipping? According to the Danish consulting firm Sea-Intelligence, it will be the MSC which, if it is currently consortium with the Danish Maersk Line to which it is linked by an agreement of vessel sharing called 2M, will no longer be from the beginning of next year ( of 25 January 2023). However, as MSC is the world's leading carrier capacity of the container fleet and having already made less binding cooperation agreements with other companies, from next year MSC - noted Sea-Intelligence - will continue to play a primary role on the world market being large as much as a shipowners' alliance.

If initially shipping companies with ships of at least 5,000 gross tonnage calling at EU ports, which are called upon to purchase allowances to offset emissions (European Union Allowances equivalent to one tonne of C02 to be returned to Member States, by 2024 will be required to surrender allowances equal to 40% of the emissions produced by the vessels operating with the Union, the following year the quota it will rise to 70% and reach 100% in 2026. Such refund will be reduced by 50% in the case of ship voyages between a port in the European Economic Area and a non-European port, unless the extra-EU transhipment port is located less than 300 nautical miles from a Union port.

To assess the impact of the EU ETS on shipping alliances, noting that to obtain maximum savings a ship must A stopover in the non-EU port closest to the first or last port of stopovers in the EU, Sea-Intelligence explained that it had calculated the savings on ETS by taking into account trips made around Africa on the Singapore-Algeciras route and modified for include the shortest route between an EU port and a non-EU port, thus paying only 50% of emissions from this port non-European to that of Algeciras compared to the 50% payment for a ship travelling directly from Singapore to Algeciras by taking a much longer route.

According to Sea-Intelligence, the network of scheduled services of the MSC would make it possible to reduce the distance notified between Asia and Europe at almost half, while the Gemini Cooperation and Premier Alliance alliances, the first established by the companies Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk and the second by HMM, ONE and Yang Ming, would be on the same competitive level. Ocean instead Alliance, which is formed by the companies CMA CGM, Evergreen, COSCO and OOCL, would benefit from a very marginal reduction of 7%. Sea-Intelligence specified that, however, Ocean Alliance did not the configuration of its service network has yet been announced for 2025 which, according to the Danish company, should take possible reduction of exposure to ETS costs.