Possible Effects of the Canal Istanbul Waterway Project on Ship Emissions: Challenges and Prospects

Canal Istanbul Waterway Project, officially announced in 2011, will be the third of the Turkish straits if realized. However, the exhaust pollution caused by transit and local ship traffic in the existing Strait of İstanbul already adversely affects human health, comfort, and the environment. Consequently, how the Canal Istanbul will affect emission pollution in this area is a problem that should be studied in advance. For this purpose, this article examined the potential exhaust emissions from ships in Canal Istanbul. In the present study, the forecast analysis of the time series was carried out using Weka (3.8.1). Two different time series forecasting methods, namely, Gaussian processes and sequence minimum optimization (SMO) regression, were employed to predict future traffic and tonnage trends. The SMO regression algorithm’s performance measurement values yielded better results than the Gaussian processes. The results of SMO regression algorithm were used in future calculations. Subsequently, the total fuel consumption of the ships was calculated. Second, the Trozzi and Vaccaro method was used, and possible nitrogen oxide (NOX), carbon dioxide (CO2), volatile organic compounds (VOC), particulate matter (PM), and sulfur oxide (SOX) emissions of the ships were calculated.