It seems like Maersk has gone from “All the Way to Zero” to “All the Way to Lowest Fuel Costs”. It’s zero slogan has been emblazoned on methanol dual-fuelled ships coming out of South Korea for the past couple of years, but the Danish carrier now looks to have bowed to economics, turning to a fuel that it had previously eschewed.
Like the great scrubber debate six or seven years ago, Maersk, previously a vocal opponent of both LNG and exhaust gas cleaning tech, has had a change of heart, in step with much of the industry, with LNG now dominating the alternative fuel orderbook.
Morten Bo Christiansen, senior vice president and head of energy transition at Maersk, said in a LinkedIn post: “The math applied in current fuel standard proposals has an unintentional consequence; it is not fuel-agnostic and financially it heavily favors LNG, a fossil fuel. The consequence of this could be that pay-to-pollute financially becomes the most attractive fuel strategy and that we materially delay the development of the much needed low-emission fuel supply chains.”
Christiansen said the fuel standard maths make the principle of pay-to-pollute the financially most attractive strategy for most shipping companies for the next decades.
According to the latest figures from DNV’s Alternative Fuels Insight (AFI) platform, 34 new orders for alternative-fuelled vessels were placed last month of which 33 were LNG.
Jason Stefanatos, global decarbonisation director at DNV Maritime, commented: “LNG remains the headline story, with a clear continuation of the trend towards these vessels evident since mid-2024. Again, this is being driven by the container segment, highlighting the importance of the voluntary market in driving maritime decarbonization.”
Based on vessels already in the orderbook, the number of LNG vessels in operation is set to almost double by the end of the decade, and the need for supporting LNG bunkering infrastructure is intensifying.
A couple of years back on this page, I stated methanol was the clear leading fuel of the future. How wrong I was!
