Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

FreightFlows leverages unique access to hundreds of million live data points/day to analyze seaborne commodities trade (such as oil, gas, chemicals, aggregates, ore and coal) to predict future market activity. We're optimizing freight operations by forecasting shipping partners, helping to secure favorable market pricing and reducing idle time and ballast legs for ships. Maritime Transportation accounts for nearly 4% of all global climate change emissions and bulk shipping suffers from significant utilization issues, with nearly half of all voyages sailed empty. Our goal is to significantly reduce the impact of emissions in the maritime transportation industry by driving down the cost and time to secure trade agreements and maximize vessel utilization.

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Our project's effect on the market for bulk cargo ships will reduce emissions by lowering downtime in which no cargo is moved but ships are still consuming fuel. This occurs along all international trade routes and at all ports, disproportionately affecting marine wildlife and coastal communities. In particular, port-adjacent communities -which are often low-income- bear the highest burden of seaborne emissions. Long idling / waiting times in port anchorages acutely impact this, and will be reduced by our services. However, the at-sea emissions which we hope to reduce, are at a global scale and affect all geographies.

The shipping industry is already very focused on reaching significantly lower emissions, exemplified by the IMO 2020 rule ([https://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-2020.aspx](https://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-2020.aspx)). Much of the market's innovation is focused on engineering and operations - making ships and fuel perform more efficiently and cleaner. However, there are few other organizations trying to improve ship utilization as a means to reduce overall emissions, as we are. Fortunately, our solution will lower overall emissions both now and in the future, when new ship and fuel types enter the market.

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