OMIT – Manual for environmental calculation of international freight transport
1 Preface
The OMIT tool has been developed to calculate the energy consumption and emissions for international freight transport to and from Denmark. The development was financed by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency's programme for promoting cleaner products. Owing to the fact that OMIT includes international transports, it is a supplement to Danish Ministry of Transports' national calculation model TEMA2000 (COWI, 2000).
OMIT was carried out in the years 2000 and 2001 by:
Institut for Transportstudier, TetraPlan A/S, Institut für Energie- und Umweltforschung Heidelberg GmbH, Danish Trade Association of International Transport, Danish Ship owners' Association, The Danish National Railway Agency, Kombi Dan A/S and DSB Traffic Planning and Environment.
TEMA2000 and OMIT are based on the same data foundation as for ship calculations, as shipping is an international trade. Regarding the calculations for railway transport, it has been necessary to provide for new European data, because the size of the trains, the energy supply and hence the environmental load depend on the country they operate in. Finally the data concerning trucks is based on a number of simulations for a 48 tons truck in TEMA2000. This increases the energy consumption and the emissions compared with the typical European 40 tons export truck, a deviation, which should be compensated by using the actual number of km/l diesel.
The project was supported by a coordination committee with participation of:
The Danish Environmental Protection Agency, The Danish Ministry of Transport, The Danish National Railway Agency, DSB Traffic Planning and Environment, Danish Ship owners' Association, Association of Danish Forwarders, Danish Shippers' Council, Danish Trade Association of International Transport and Kombi Dan A/S.
The elaboration and the adjustment of OMIT and the calculation models to the need of the industry could not have been carried out without help from numerous contributors. We therefore wish to announce our appreciation to:
Danfoss A/S, DFDS Tor Line Group A/S, Central Soya European Proteins A/S, the Danish Energy Agency, A/S Roulunds Fabriker, Scandlines A/S and Schenker-BTL A/S for their time and contribution, which we have done our best to include in the project.
It has been emphasized that OMIT should be easy to use. This also means that there is only a limited number of transport parameters that can be changed. The selection of the values which are changeable, was made from criteria of importance:
 | They must be important to the energy consumption and environmental load of the transport |
| Forwarder and transport buyer must have considerable influence on these. |
This is the basic idea of OMIT; we hope you will enjoy the program. Our hope is that besides calculating environmental values, it can provide increased knowledge about how transport provider and transport buyer are able to reduce the environmental load, and that they will act accordingly.
The project was delivered to the Danish EPA, October 2001.