The debate over shipping’s energy future unfolds in United Nations plenaries focused solely on the ship, asking which architecture will prevail and which fuel will power the deep‑sea fleet of 2050. Necessary questions, but incomplete ones. Every candidate fuel, whether ammonia, methanol, hydrogen, or electricity itself, is first a landside proposition, produced, moved, stored, and transferred through built infrastructure before a single tonne crosses a fuel manifold. And every fuel that can credibly carry the ‘green’ claim begins life as renewable electricity: green hydrogen is water split by clean power, while green ammonia and green methanol are that hydrogen recombined. […]

The approval of the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) Net-Zero Framework (NZF) in April 2025 is seen by many as a breakthrough for the energy transition of international shipping. A key component of the NZF is a price on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from ships that do not meet a two-tiered GHG fuel intensity standard. Crucially, this GHG price will raise revenues, which will be distributed by the NZF. The fund is expected to raise around $10-12 billion per year in its first few years of operation. While support for the NZF remained solid at the last Marine Environment Protection Committee […]

Despite years of debate around alternative fuels, few projects have attempted to install hydrogen propulsion on existing vessels. Newbuilds can be designed around fuel storage, ventilation, machinery layouts and safety systems from the outset. Retrofitting a ship designed decades earlier is a very different challenge. That is what makes the conversion of the 25-year-old research vessel Prince Madog significant. The vessel was awarded Lloyd’s Register’s ShipRight Risk Based Certification (RBC) at Seawork 2026, recognising an approach that addresses risk where prescriptive rules for hydrogen retrofits remain limited. Jointly operated by O.S. Energy and Bangor University, Prince Madog is being fitted […]

At the end of February, Brent was trading at $72 a barrel. By the end of March, it reached nearly $120 a barrel. ICE Gasoil front-month moved more than $400 a metric tonne (mt) in a fortnight. Low sulphur marine gasoil (LSMGO) in Singapore briefly disappeared from the spot market altogether. Iraq, Oman, Bahrain and the UAE all saw export terminals struck or evacuated within days of each other. The de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the series of events that followed, is a familiar reality for everyone in the marine fuels value chain. What has caught […]

If there is one market that illustrates how quickly renewable methanol is moving from ambition to commercial reality, it is China. As the world’s largest methanol producer and one of the most important markets for international shipping, developments in China increasingly shape the direction of the global maritime transition. China’s progress demonstrates that renewable methanol is moving beyond pilot projects and into commercial operation. But it also highlights a challenge that extends well beyond its borders: the market is beginning to move faster than the policy frameworks needed to scale it. That is becoming the defining challenge – not only […]