Routing-Method Effects on Distance, Time, Fuel, and Emissions in Europe-Asia Trade: A Comparison of the Suez, Cape, and Northern Sea Route Corridors
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866914175813419008 |
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| author | Mohameda, Abdella Hendricksb, Christian Hua, Xiangyu |
| author_facet | Mohameda, Abdella Hendricksb, Christian Hua, Xiangyu |
| contents | Growing interest in decarbonization and Arctic accessibility has renewed attention on Europe-Asia shipping corridors. The Northern Sea Route (NSR) is often portrayed as a 30-40% shortcut relative to Suez, with savings propagated to time, fuel, and CO2. The effect of enforcing sea-only feasibility on these baselines, and its downstream impact on time, fuel, and CO2, remains under-examined.
We compare great-circle baselines with sea-only routes computed via A-star search (A*) on a 0.5-degree grid between Northern Europe and Northeast Asia across the Suez, Cape of Good Hope, and NSR corridors under three waypoint philosophies. Distances are mapped to voyage time using corridor-typical speeds and to fuel/CO2 using main- and auxiliary-engine accounting.
Sea-only routing preserves the ranking NSR < Suez < Cape but compresses NSR's advantage once realistic speeds are applied. NSR remains shortest (about 8000-10000 nm versus 11000-12000 nm for Suez), yet typical durations differ modestly and fuel/CO2 savings over Suez are small and variant-dependent. Equal-speed tests restore geometric ordering, and endpoint sensitivity shows larger NSR gains for more northern East Asian ports.
The framework provides a reproducible, corridor-agnostic benchmark for later integration of sea ice, weather, regulatory overlays, and AIS data in dynamic Arctic voyage planning. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01076 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Routing-Method Effects on Distance, Time, Fuel, and Emissions in Europe-Asia Trade: A Comparison of the Suez, Cape, and Northern Sea Route Corridors Mohameda, Abdella Hendricksb, Christian Hua, Xiangyu Physics and Society Geophysics Growing interest in decarbonization and Arctic accessibility has renewed attention on Europe-Asia shipping corridors. The Northern Sea Route (NSR) is often portrayed as a 30-40% shortcut relative to Suez, with savings propagated to time, fuel, and CO2. The effect of enforcing sea-only feasibility on these baselines, and its downstream impact on time, fuel, and CO2, remains under-examined. We compare great-circle baselines with sea-only routes computed via A-star search (A*) on a 0.5-degree grid between Northern Europe and Northeast Asia across the Suez, Cape of Good Hope, and NSR corridors under three waypoint philosophies. Distances are mapped to voyage time using corridor-typical speeds and to fuel/CO2 using main- and auxiliary-engine accounting. Sea-only routing preserves the ranking NSR < Suez < Cape but compresses NSR's advantage once realistic speeds are applied. NSR remains shortest (about 8000-10000 nm versus 11000-12000 nm for Suez), yet typical durations differ modestly and fuel/CO2 savings over Suez are small and variant-dependent. Equal-speed tests restore geometric ordering, and endpoint sensitivity shows larger NSR gains for more northern East Asian ports. The framework provides a reproducible, corridor-agnostic benchmark for later integration of sea ice, weather, regulatory overlays, and AIS data in dynamic Arctic voyage planning. |
| title | Routing-Method Effects on Distance, Time, Fuel, and Emissions in Europe-Asia Trade: A Comparison of the Suez, Cape, and Northern Sea Route Corridors |
| topic | Physics and Society Geophysics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01076 |