Current market conditions offer a great opportunity for the shipping lines to review and invest in their decarbonisation goals while keeping end consumers in mind, Lars Mikael Jensen, head of global ocean network at Maersk, told delegates in his keynote address at the Xeneta Summit 2021.
“But at the end of the day it is the end consumer who will drive the global decarbonisation agenda,” he said.
“Initially it will be more costly. We offer a product where we can ship carbon-neutral using used cooking oil – and a lot of customers are paying more.”
This year, however, he said while it was more real, it was not scalable.
“We eat a lot of French fries but not as many as we need. We need a lot of cooking oil to make it scalable.
“But we believe in the slipstream of this there will be producers - and I wouldn’t be surprised that with evolution and innovation the cost of producing biomethanol will be cheaper than fuel.”
Using the analogy of international travel, he said that while in the past the cost of long-distance travel had been high, these costs were now significantly reduced – and the same would apply in the case of biomethanol.
Jensen identified sustainability and digitalisation as the deciding factors in determining the success or failure of any business in the long run.
