Industry writes its own safety casebook as fuel rules lag

The UK Chamber of Shipping has published the first-year findings of its Safety of Alternative Fuels Working Group. These are preliminary, industry-built risk assessments across five fuel pathways, drawing on more than 200 participants from over 50 organisations. The timing gives the work its edge. IMO’s mid-term measures, including a global fuel standard and emissions pricing, were postponed at MEPC 83 in late 2025, yet owners are committing to new fuels regardless. The evidence base for doing that safely is now being assembled by the industry itself.

The report, Alternative Fuels: Building the Safety Evidence Base, covers battery energy storage systems, biofuels, methanol, hydrogen and ammonia. LNG was excluded as a settled safety case; nuclear was parked as requiring a standalone scope. The working group was chaired by Shell Shipping and Maritime technology manager Stephen Brown with V.Group commercial director for decarbonisation James Helliwell as vice chair. Discussions were coordinated by the Chamber’s policy director for environment, Francesco Sandrelli, and five technical workshops ran through 2025 with presenters from the likes of Corvus, CalMac, LR FOBAS, MAN Energy Solutions, ABS, Wärtsilä, V.Ships, DNV, Shell, Yara, Fortescue and the Port of Rotterdam.

Mr Helliwell put his finger on why the exercise matters: much of the pilot and trial work done across the industry “is often hard to come by and not publicly available”. Pooling it, fuel by fuel, into structured hazard matrices is the report’s core contribution.

What the matrices say

The fuel-by-fuel picture is varied. For battery systems, thermal runaway and fire dominate, with battery management system resilience, ventilation and emergency power the recurring vulnerabilities; recommended mitigations run from BMS redundancy to crew thermal runaway drills. For methanol, the group judged operational maturity to be growing, with loss of containment, the near-invisible flame and simultaneous operations during bunkering the primary concerns. Rene Laursen, director of fuels and technology at ABS, captured the workshop consensus that “the risks are manageable using established industrial practices”, a view reinforced by MOL’s account of running methanol-fuelled tonnage since 2019.

Biofuels emerge as the pragmatic near-term pathway, but with a risk profile that spans both the commercial and the catastrophic. Chief concerns include unknown fuel grades that can invalidate warranties and insurance, FAME incompatibility with tank coatings and seals, hygroscopic blends breeding sludge and bacteria, and Proof of Sustainability paperwork carrying real economic exposure. Hydrogen presents storage and explosion risk plus cryogenic handling challenges for the liquid form, though the report’s striking conclusion, voiced by Shell senior marine engineer Arulmani Arunachalam, is that the barrier is migrating: first movers have shown hydrogen “can be handled safely”, and “what remains to be solved is affordability”.

Ammonia is the outlier, and the report does not soften it. Toxicity makes loss of containment the overarching scenario towards which bunkering hose failure, dropped objects, valve misalignment and collision all converge. Mr Sandrelli, reflecting on what he called one of the group’s most challenging sessions, drew the conclusion with the widest consequences: “preparedness must extend beyond the vessel” to port workers, adjacent crews, local responders and communities. The report adds a commercial sting: conservative port decisions could restrict access and trade for ammonia-fuelled ships before the first of them arrives. Safety acceptance, for ammonia, is becoming a market-access question.