After the International Maritime Organization proposed emissions and sustainability regulations last month, seven NGOs and industry alliances, representing 82 clean maritime and green hydrogen industry stakeholders, have written a letter saying the proposals were “disappointing” and did not go far enough to support the transition to lower emission fuels.
“The regulations fail to price enough of shipping’s total GHG emissions to ensure the maritime energy transition goes fast and far enough, and is just and equitable,” the letter states. “The pricing mechanism agreed fails to put penalties on close to 90% of emissions, weakening the incentive to shift away from fossil fuels, and limiting the availability of funds to drive the transition. The upshot is that the sector is set to miss its 2030 goals, and will cut at most 10% of shipping emissions by 2030, a far cry from the IMO’s 2023 Strategy target of 30%.”
The letter’s signatories include the SASHA Coalition, ZESTAs, NABU, Carbon Market Watch, the Green Hydrogen Organisation, ZERO – Associação Sistema Terrestre Sustentável, and Cittadini per l’aria onlus, representing voices across the green maritime value chain and non-profits. It states that the IMO regulations fail to adequately support green hydrogen and derived e-fuels, “that present the only credible fuel path to clean maritime” in preference to biofuels and LNG.
The group argues that more ambitious IMO measures could have eased existing barriers for the industry’s growth. A stronger price on all shipping pollution and high rewards targeting early green hydrogen fuel adoption would have helped e-fuel producers access the finances needed to increase production, and ships to switch to e-fuels. Instead, they say, the weak measures will leave pioneering green companies continuing to struggle to develop, at the expense of global and EU climate goals and European industry.
“The EU must deliver the policy support that the shipping industry is crying out for and that the IMO failed to secure,” said Aurelia Leeuw, Director of EU Policy at the SASHA Coalition “There is only one credible path to net zero shipping, and that is using green hydrogen fuels. But without EU support, the maritime sector will not be able to access and adopt these fuels, in turn failing to deliver the potential for industrial competitiveness these innovative sectors promise Europe.”
To amend the IMO measures’ shortcomings, the letter urges the EU Commission to adopt a policy roadmap based on already planned legislation. This would include:
- Introducing financial mechanisms to support e-fuel producers in the upcoming Sustainable Transport Investment Plan (2025).
- Expanding the maritime ETS and use revenues to support e-fuels (2026).
- Strengthening e-fuel uptake targets in the FuelEU Maritime review (2027).
- Continuing to push for ambitious regulation at the IMO that incentivise e-fuel uptake.
“From every angle, be it climate, industry, or innovation, it is in the EU’s best interest to strengthen clean shipping regulation where the IMO didn’t,” Madadh MacLaine, Secretary General of the Zero Emissions Ship Technology Association (ZESTAs), “The IMO measures could have delivered the gust of wind ZESTAs’ members needed to set their next-generation technologies sailing, but instead it opened a gap for solutions that will bake in infrastructure investment in fuels that may do more harm than good: biofuels and LNG.
“ZESTAs calls upon the EU to support rigorous and specific science-based fuel lifecycle analysis methodology at the IMO, to support nascent ZEST industry, penalise pollution, and to strengthen its own targets, for the sake of the shipping industry’s future resilience as much as for the climate.”
