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| Thu, 26th Aug 2021 16:59:00 |
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It’s Thursday, August 26, and the world’s largest shipping company is spending $1.4 billion on cleaner ocean vessels. |
Shipping is responsible for nearly 3 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions, and shipping-related emissions have been growing since 2012. In an effort to tackle that trend, the Danish shipping firm Maersk announced on Tuesday it is placing an order for eight new cargo boats that can run without heavy fuel oil.
“We don’t believe in more fossil fuels,” said Morten Bo Christiansen, Maersk’s vice president and head of decarbonization, in an interview with Bloomberg Green. Instead, the firm’s new ships will be capable of running on “carbon neutral” bio-methanol or e-methanol, alternative fuels that produce much less pollution than their carbon-intensive cousins.
Bio-methanol can be made from biomass like crop waste, while e-methanol is made by combining hydrogen atoms with carbon dioxide. Both are currently expensive to make and hard to come by, but Maersk’s CEO said in a statement that he hoped the company’s sizable purchase — $175 million per ship for a total investment of $1.4 billion — would send a market signal that demand for green methanol is growing.
Maersk expects its new ships to hit the high seas by early 2024. Eventually, the company plans to decarbonize its entire fleet, in alignment with its commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
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