Thank you, Chair. I'll try and be brief and can answer any bits in more detail. But, for ports, there are three main areas and each one is an increasing challenge. So, there's decarbonising port operations themselves, which are typically a minuscule amount of the overall emissions in a port, so less than 2 per cent, less than 1 per cent in some cases—cranes, bridges, ramps, that sort of thing, forklifts, usually running on diesel. A big challenge for ports is that there is as well as—. That's probably going to be electrification, especially as the tax rebate for diesel, red diesel, in non-road diesel machinery is withdrawn next year, so big cost challenges for ports there. But it's fairly—. We can see it's probably going to be electrification, maybe some retrofit in some of that gear, but that remains a big challenge—big costs associated with that. Most ports don't have big margins, so they are going to have to find that money from somewhere.
The next one is ships in ports. We don't for the most part operate ships; they're our customers, they're our users, so we have a limited amount of control over them, especially those that are internationally trading ships that are regulated by the UN, essentially. So, dealing with or decarbonising ships at berth when they're alongside is a big challenge; lots of ports are looking at shore power, plugging those ships in, although the costs are in most cases eye-watering. It depends on the segment very much, so it's a very different challenge for a ferry than it is for an oil tanker. It depends on the size of the ship. We've done loads of work on that—I'm happy to talk more or send some more information— but no port in the world has installed shore power for big ships without public support, and we've looked at hundreds of projects. It's just not feasible in most cases. For small ships, it's a bit easier.
And then, the third part of it is ports' role in supporting the decarbonisation of ships whilst they're on voyage, so decarbonising ships' propulsion, and that is a big challenge, because we don't know what fuels are going to be used. It's probably going to be a mix of fuels. Ships, big ships in particular, are incredibly difficult to decarbonise. So, there's a lot of uncertainty around will it be hydrogen or methanol or ammonia or batteries, and so there's clearly a role for infrastructure in supporting that, it's just trying to get an idea of which ship segments are going where, and how are ports going to support that? But again, there's going to be significant cost somewhere there, so in terms of what we're doing, as an association we're supporting the industry. There are loads of interesting projects going on. I can share some of those with the committee afterwards—mostly small-scale things at the moment, demonstrations and other bits and pieces like that. But again, we're working closely with Government to try and make sure that the costs of that—. Decarbonisation is going to be a huge cost, and we want to make sure that those costs are equitably shared so that they don't land all on ports, and they don't land all on ships, or indeed the taxpayer. So, there's a lot of thinking going on about that at the moment, and then, very briefly, we've also got a broader role in supporting offshore renewables, which helps the wider decarbonisation of the whole electricity supply chain, and that will have some added benefits in that, for the first time, ports are going to be much closer to the generation of electricity, rather than being at the end of a long wire, so that presents us some opportunities. But—it's a bit of a cliché—the big challenge is getting enough electricity into ports to either directly power equipment and ships in some cases, and charging them, or in many cases, generating hydrogen or whatever the fuel may be, which may well take large amounts of electricity. Sorry, I tried to cover quite a lot of ground there.