Green light for Rotterdam-Singapore green corridor

Mass balancing

In October 2024, Shell supplied 100 tonnes of biomethane to one of CMA CGM’s box ships, CMA CGM Tivoli, against the production of a certificate. Under mass balancing – a term that will surely become common - biomethane producers deliver the fuel for a price into an existing natural gas grid through an approach called chain of custody. According to the parties involved, the main purpose of chain of custody is to allow all the stakeholders to follow the paper trail and be certain of the integrity of the materials moving along the value chain.

According to SEA-LNG, this arrangement is also preferred by regulators because of its lower cost and greater simplicity compared with alternatives. Currently, a number of regulators are evaluating how mass balancing worked at Rotterdam with a view to expanding it elsewhere.

Singapore’s Maritime and Port Authority (MPA) plans to repeat the mass-balancing exercise sometime this year. Already the world’s biggest bunkering port, with total sales of 55M tonnes in 2024, up 6% y-o-y, Singapore is also growing its sales of alternative fuels; during 2024, they doubled to 1.34M tonnes, largely on the back of biofuel blends. A project for 2025, according to the authority’s latest annual report, is to “explore scalable solutions for sea-based LNG reloading to complement the existing onshore LNG bunkering storage and jetty capacities.” This would facilitate the supply of e-biomethane.

Always striving to be ahead of the game, Singapore is also exploring opportunities in methanol and ammonia, albeit on a small scale. Over 1,600 tonnes of methanol was bunkered in 2024, while several tonnes of ammonia was loaded in a world-first trial.

Geographic neutrality

An emerging force in the fuelling of the green corridors is Zemba, the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance. Launched in late 2023, it is a multinational organisation that is working towards a tender system for zero-emissions fuels. Zemba is a collective aiming for commercial-scale purchasing for deep-sea routes, such as Rotterdam-Singapore. The tenders are based on a ‘book and claim’ system that separates all the paperwork required by the environmental attributes from the actual physical delivery of the fuel. The environmental attributes are ticked off via a series of certificates that are issued along the way. According to Zemba, this seemingly convoluted chain is required by the global and diversified logistical needs of freight buyers.

It is all about geographic neutrality. “The cargo flows of freight buyers may not always align with each other, temporally or geographically. Nor do the cargo flows necessarily align with the locations where zero-emission fuels and technologies are available, or could be deployed, particularly in the early years of the transition,” explains the organisation in a lengthy paper.

In the absence of a formally accepted definition of what exactly is a zero or near-zero fuel, Zemba has come up with one of its own.  Namely, “fuels that have the potential to achieve GHG (CO2, CH4 and N2O) emissions reductions equal to, or greater than, 90% when compared to a commonly used reference fuel: LSFO of pure residual type, (LSFO-R) such as Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) or Light Fuel Oil (LFO).”

The winner of Zemba’s first tender, announced at Singapore Maritime Week in early 2024, was Hapag-Lloyd. For reasons of commercial sensitivity, neither the price, total monetary value nor other financial details were released. However, the nature of the fuel is no secret – it is biomethane sourced from landfill, dairy and swine manure, and organic waste that comply with the EU’s Red II standard.

“If the vessel ran its engines on methane, its emissions would plummet by about 80%”

The project is being closely watched along the green corridors. As Zemba explains: “The outcomes of this tender provide the first, real-time window into the readiness of the container shipping sector to provide these solutions through a competitive process and the near-term availability of fuels that can offer a 90% or greater reduction in well-to-wake CO2e emissions.”

Digitisation

Green corridors are more than the fuel however. A highly efficient digital chain running the entire route is meant to increase the frequency of just-in-time deliveries so that the vessel is not delayed outside or inside the port. It is based on management of port traffic, paperless communication, and streamlined customs clearance.

When the Rotterdam-Singapore green corridor was launched in 2022, Quah Ley Hoon, MPA chief executive at the time, predicted the project would “accelerate our digital efforts to optimise maritime efficiency and improve supply chain resilience.”

It is certainly doing that. But in the longer run, the availability and cost of biofuels remain the biggest challenge for all of the green corridors.