With so many low-carbon, carbon-neutral and carbon-negative shipping fuels being touted as the next big thing, it can be hard to determine which are for real and which are mostly hype. Some folks have been talking up LNG, biofuels, clean ammonia, fuel cells ... the list goes on and on. One way to separate the most promising prospects from the also-rans is to keep track of where big shipping companies are placing their bets — and how they’re hedging those wagers, just in case it takes longer than expected to develop fuel-production facilities. Clean methanol in particular is showing signs that it may be one of the frontrunners on both the supply and the demand sides, with an increasing number of firm orders being placed for massive container ships and other vessels that can be fueled by either methanol or low-sulfur fuel oil (LSFO) — there’s the hedge — and a number of new clean methanol production facilities being planned in the U.S. and overseas. (But still, a healthy dose of skepticism about it all is warranted.) In today’s RBN blog, we discuss recent developments in the clean methanol space.
As we said in Break Up to Make Up, the global shipping industry spent the 2010s ratcheting down emissions of old-school pollutants — mostly sulfur dioxide (SO2) — from the 50,000-plus tankers, dry bulkers, container ships, tankers, cruise ships, and other commercial vessels plying international waters. The International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) ever-tightening environmental rules ratcheted down the maximum allowable sulfur content in marine fuel used around most of the world from 4.5% in January 2010 to only 0.5% in January 2020, when IMO 2020 was implemented. [Since 2015, the allowable sulfur content in bunkers used in the IMO’s Emission Control Areas (ECAs) — which include Europe’s Baltic and North seas and areas within 200 nautical miles of the U.S. and Canadian coasts — has been an even lower 0.1%.]
For the IMO and shipping industry, the 2020s have been all about reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, especially carbon dioxide (CO2). Global shipping activity accounts for about 3% of total GHGs and the IMO, which sets emissions and other rules for the industry, in July established a revised goal of reducing the industry’s global GHG emissions by at least 20% (and ideally 30%) from the 2008 level by 2030 and at least 70% (and ideally 80%) by 2040, then achieve net-zero GHG emissions as close to 2050 as possible.
Join Backstage Pass to Read Full Article
About the song
“We're Gonna Make It” was written by Gene Barge, Billy Davis, Raynard Miner and Carl William Smith, and appears as the first song on side one of Little Milton’s debut studio album of the same name. Released as a single in March 1965, the record went to #1 on the Billboard R&B Singles chart and #25 on the Hot 100 Singles chart. The song was a metaphor for the civil rights struggle at the time, providing an uplifting lyric about making it through hard times in a manner similar to Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come,” released a few months earlier. Personnel on the record were: Little Milton (vocal, guitar) and unnamed Chicago blues session musicians.
The album We're Gonna Make It was recorded in January 1965 at Chess Records Tel Mar Studio, with Phil Wright producing. Released in March 1965 on the Chess subsidiary Checker label, it went to #3 on the R&B Albums chart and #101 on the Billboard 200 Albums chart. Two singles were released from the LP.
Little Milton (James Milton Campbell Jr.) was an American blues singer and guitarist. A native of the Mississippi Delta, Milton began his career recording for Sam Phillips’s Sun Records in Memphis in 1953. He released 27 studio albums, 18 compilation albums, three live albums and 99 singles. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and received a W.C. Handy Award in 1988. There is a marker honoring him on the Mississippi Blues Trail in his hometown of Inverness, MS. Little Milton died in August 2005 at the age of 70.
Comments
There is every reason to believe that low carbon bio-methanol or CCS methanol will get more expensive rather than cheaper at bigger volumes as competition builds for bio feedstock and carbon storage. See corn ethanol and renewable diesel as examples. They are both feedstock-limited and plateaued out at a small percentage of demand.
You imply cost doesn't matter since the IMO can mandate anything it wants. I don’t think they can successfully mandate a fuel that is, say, 2X in cost (on top of the 1.5X they already have in complying with current IMO regs). The impact on shipping would be catastrophic. But the more serious problem is, what happens when they mandate a fuel that doesn’t exist at any price? They will have to face reality and change the regs.
I object to your using the term "clean methanol" when you mean low carbon methanol. Methanol produced from natural gas is substantially cleaner than LNG and LSFO. I suggest avoiding the implication that methanol produced from natural gas is not clean.
Best regards,
Phil Lewis