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Shipping firms caught in fuel dilemma test the waters with 'green corridors'
(Eco Business, 15 Feb 2022) The past few months have seen two of such maritime transport routes being set in motion — across the Pacific between the ports of Shanghai and Los Angeles, and across the Atlantic between the ports of Antwerp and Montreal.
Leaders of the world’s largest shipping companies who gathered at an ocean summit in France last week threw their weight behind the piloting of maritime green corridors.
The relatively new concept, likened to the creation of special economic zones at sea, allows companies to deploy and phase-in low carbon shipping technologies and business models at scale. More importantly, shipping leaders believe that by moving ahead to operationalise the new routes, it will help them side-step a critical deadlock that the industry is currently facing: whether to use liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a ‘bridge fuel’ for shipping’s decarbonisation.
In April last year, the World Bank shocked many in the sector when it published a maritime decarbonisation report recommending countries to pull back from investing further in LNG bunkering infrastructure. The financial institution later took its anti-LNG stance to the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), and argued that it sees green ammonia and green hydrogen as the more promising options to decarbonise international shipping.
In recent years, methane slips from ships fuelled by LNG have increasingly come under the spotlight of regulators. The scrutiny is undermining investments by some ship owners and attempts to make a case for the so-called “transition fuel” have not been successful.
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Eco Business, 15 Feb 2022: Shipping firms caught in fuel dilemma test the waters with 'green corridors'
