Modelling the impacts of uncertain carbon tax policy on maritime fleet mix strategy and carbon mitigation

The maritime transport industry continues to draw international attention on significant Greenhouse Gas emissions. The introduction of emissions taxes aims to control and reduce emissions. The uncertainty of carbon tax policy affects shipping companies’ fleet planning and increases costs. We formulate the fleet planning problem under carbon tax policy uncertainty a multi-stage stochastic integer-programming model for the liner shipping companies. We develop a scenario tree to represent the structure of the carbon tax stochastic dynamics, and seek the optimal planning, which is adaptive to the policy uncertainty. Non-anticipativity constraint is applied to ensure the feasibility of the decisions in the dynamic environment. For the sake of comparison, the Perfect Information (PI) model is introduced as well. Based on a liner shipping application of our model, we find that under the policy uncertainty, companies charter more ships when exposed to high carbon tax risk, and spend more on fleet operation; meanwhile the CO2 emission volume will be reduced