Inland Waterways: 41 Vessels Now Measure Their Carbon with BoatOn
A barge skipper knows roughly what he burns. He watches the gauge, he sets one month's fuel invoices against the next, and in time he forms a fair picture of his vessel's appetite. What he does not know is what one voyage cost him against another, or what half a knot less would have saved. Across the French inland fleet, almost nobody does.
That gap is what ADEME, the French environment and energy agency, Entreprises Fluviales de France (E2F, the national inland shipping federation) and the Paris Port Community have set out to close. The three bodies have chosen BoatOn to fit 41 inland freight vessels with a connected unit that will record, automatically and for a year, their fuel consumption and navigation parameters. The work falls under the LOG-te scheme of ReMoVe, a French energy savings certificate programme.
The exercise looks purely technical. It touches, however, on an awkwardness the sector has carried for years, since inland shipping is universally presented as leaner than road haulage without holding the readings that would prove it. The scheme was set before the industry at the Assises nationales du fleuve, France's national inland waterways convention, held in Marseille on 15 and 16 October, and six trade titles reported on it between 21 May and 27 October 2026. Three questions follow: what will actually be fitted on board, what the measurements will and will not establish, and the part the BoatOn Book plays in it.
The essentials
41 inland vessels will be instrumented under the LOG-te scheme of ReMoVe, a French energy savings certificate programme worth 38 million euros over four years.
Three commissioning bodies: ADEME, which runs the scheme, E2F as associate sponsor and national coordinator, and the Paris Port Community, which drives the roll-out on the ground.
Each vessel receives a connected unit that collects consumption and navigation data automatically, plus one year of access to the BoatOn Book.
Six older vessels will also get flow meters fitted by Ecomer Data, interfaced with the software that centralises the data.
The coverage. Six articles published between 21 May and 27 October 2026, in the marine equipment trade press, the port logistics press and the regional business press.
This ReMoVe project shows that decarbonising inland shipping is possible today. We are putting our technology at the service of inland waterway operators. — Bertrand Gerbaud, president of BoatOn, quoted by Ports et corridors
The paradox ReMoVe sets out to resolve
Nobody disputes that the waterway emits less than the road. It is the arithmetic that is thin. The figures circulating in the trade come from average emission factors and theoretical ratios, almost never from readings taken on board. Yet a shipper weighing a lorry against a barge does not decide on a national average: he needs a figure that will stand up in front of his own auditor, and that carries a date.
There is nothing mysterious about the gap. French inland fleets hold a high share of older vessels, often run by firms of a few employees, for whom fitting sensors has never been the month's priority. The absence of data reflects a lack of equipment, not a lack of interest. Asking those operators for further declarations would therefore have achieved nothing: what needed funding was the instrumentation itself, and that is the course LOG-te took.
One unit per vessel, flow meters for the oldest
For each vessel the programme covers the supply and fitting of a connected unit that gathers consumption and navigation data on its own. To that is added a year of access to the BoatOn Book, which holds maintenance, crew management, the logbook and automated carbon accounting in a single environment. The operator has nothing to key in at the end of the day: the vessel does the talking.
That left the vessels too old to give anything up by themselves. Six of them will receive flow meters fitted by Ecomer Data, which will measure the fuel actually burned before passing the reading to the monitoring system. The detail may look minor; it is not. Dropping those vessels on grounds of age would have hollowed out the whole exercise, since they are precisely the ones that burn the most.
Fuel measured, emissions calculated
One point governs the whole reading of the results to come, and it is better stated now than afterwards. The system records fuel consumption; CO2 emissions are then derived from it by applying the relevant emission factors. No vessel therefore carries a sensor measuring a greenhouse gas release directly, as Bouger à Bordeaux notes, alone among the six titles in pausing on the distinction.
A second caveat follows, and BoatOn accepts it readily: at this stage the announcement covers instrumentation and operator support, and it attributes no savings percentage to the 41 vessels. Establishing a gain will mean comparing consumption at constant activity, failing which a simple fall in traffic would pass for a gain in efficiency. Only on that condition will the figures hold in front of a third party. It is also, precisely, what separates a measurement from a sales argument.
From Marseille to the Seine
It was in Marseille, on 15 and 16 October, that the project was put before the industry, at the third edition of the Assises nationales du fleuve run by E2F. The choice of city was not incidental, since Marseille is the seaward gateway of the Mediterranean-Rhône-Saône axis, the country's second inland corridor after Seine-Scheldt. For two days the talk was of water resources, corridors and funding, and the same question ran under one panel after another: what exactly will the sector use to prove what it has been claiming for twenty years?
The division of roles within the consortium explains, in fact, why the scheme reaches operators at all. E2F handles national coordination with government, while the Paris Port Community, with its 130 members along the Seine, drives the roll-out on the ground and brings owners in one by one. The scheme does not descend from a ministry onto a fleet: it travels through the organisations operators already belong to.
The pick-up in the trade press
None of these six titles is a national daily, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. They are trade papers, read by narrow but exactly relevant audiences: marine equipment, port logistics, regional business. Each pulled the thread that mattered to its readers, and together they end up giving a reasonably complete account of the scheme:
Atlantic Cluster, 21 May 2026. “BoatOn chosen to measure the environmental impact of the French inland fleet” opens the file and frames the paradox: a mode widely held to be virtuous, yet short of the data that would prove it.
Boat Industry, 12 October 2026. Writing for the equipment trade, Maxime Leriche takes the most pragmatic angle in “Decarbonising inland transport: BoatOn equips 41 vessels”: cutting emissions without replacing the vessels straight away, by finding the margins before committing to a repower.
Ports et corridors, 19 October 2026. “Inland shipping: software to measure environmental impact” comes at it from port logistics and reports BoatOn's case that vessels already in service are the blind spot of decarbonisation policy.
Échos Judiciaires Girondins, 26 October 2026. “Carbon impact: Bordeaux-based BoatOn to fit 41 inland vessels with monitoring” runs it under its small business desk, from the standpoint of a region following its companies' growth.
Europe Says, 27 October 2026. The European pick-up moves the story beyond France, which matters for a scheme whose findings bear on the whole Rhine basin.
Bouger à Bordeaux, 27 October 2026. “BoatOn: the Bordeaux company that will measure the fuel burn of 41 inland vessels” offers the most technical reading of the set, separating measurement from calculation and noting that a gain has yet to be demonstrated.
The levers measurement makes visible
LOG-te does not come down to fitting boxes and waiting. It pairs a diagnostic, an action plan and consumption monitoring, and the levers it targets have as much to do with how a vessel is run as with the equipment itself:
Vessel handling. Adjusting transit speed has an immediate effect, provided the consumption curve can be watched rather than guessed at.
Rotation planning. Time under way, waiting alongside and cargo carried all weigh on the result, and explain why two apparently identical runs do not produce the same figures.
Hull condition. A clean hull is one of those cumulative gains only continuous measurement allows an operator to claim.
Shore power. Connecting alongside limits engine running at berth, a line item rarely quantified for want of instrumentation.
Preparing a repower. Monitoring does not replace the investment decision: it supplies what is needed to rank it, then to verify over time that it delivered.
Taken one at a time, none of these levers is much to look at. It is their accumulation that tells, which is why continuous measurement beats the one-off audit, a pattern we had already seen in the operational data from wind-assisted ships.
The BoatOn Book, the reference software for French inland shipping
Three bodies, public and professional, had to choose the tool on which the first measurement campaign across a representative inland fleet would rest. They settled on the BoatOn Book. No instrumentation exercise on this scale had previously been carried out on the French inland fleet, which makes it the sector's reference software today, by use rather than by assertion.
The choice is explained first by scope. Where the market offers specialised tools that then have to be wired to one another, the BoatOn Book holds maintenance, crew management, the logbook and automated carbon accounting in one environment. For a firm running a handful of vessels the difference is anything but academic: between a tool genuinely kept up on board and a stack of files nobody updates any more, the gap is not one of comfort but of kind.
A complete scope. Maintenance, crew, logbook and carbon footprint in one working environment, along the lines set out in our guide to marine CMMS.
Defensible data. A record built as the work happens, usable in front of a shipper, a lender or a verifier, on the same logic as the electronic logbook now written into French ship safety regulations.
A fleet-level view. The ability to compare vessels against one another and spot the outliers, which no isolated reading allows.
French software, many fleets. Deployed from inland freight to passenger shuttles, from fishing to marine works fleets, and available in 25 languages for international crews.
Then there is cost, which often settles adoption in firms of a few employees. ReMoVe funds access for a year, clearing the initial hurdle; beyond that, the question becomes the familiar one of matching the tool to the size of the fleet. The same documentary pressure is building at sea, where the European Commission has proposed extending the carbon market to ships of 400 to 5,000 GT by 2031. The sequence never varies: you declare first, then you pay on what you declared.
The 41 vessels have yet to produce their first curves, and most of the work lies ahead: fitting the units, recording, then comparing at constant activity. Still, the sector will come to the next modal shift debate with something other than national averages. It will have a representative fleet, instrumented, whose fuel burn can be compared vessel to vessel and over time. For an industry that has argued its case for twenty years without being able to produce its own figures, that is no small shift.
Your vessels are not among the 41 selected? Nothing stops you trying the BoatOn Book on your own fleet and seeing what your fuel figures have to say. The modules, plans and pricing are set out on the BoatOn offers page.
Photo credits: Unsplash and Pexels, free licence.
