The global fuel market is no longer shaped by abundance, but by the challenge of mobilizing enough demand to justify investment in carbon-neutral fuels. Bo Cerup-Simonsen, CEO of the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping, emphasizes that shift, saying that shipping companies “are used to operating in a world where energy is abundant and nobody else wants it. That’s no longer the case.”
That observation appears in Accelleron’s recent report, Deadlock: What’s stopping shipping’s carbon-neutral fuel transition, which explores five “deadlocks” the company has identified that stand in the way of shipping’s ambition to decarbonize its fuel supply and reach net zero.
Diverging fuel choices in the drive for decarbonization is the first deadlock addressed in the report. It states, “Fuel pathway uncertainty fragments demand and dilutes investment in scalable net-zero solutions.”
With 12 or more fuels currently under consideration, diversity quickly becomes investment fragmentation. Capital is spread thin, limiting the potential of any single carbon-neutral fuel to scale globally.
This is a critical point, given the quantity of fuel required. Accelleron’s report draws on a range of sources to estimate how much carbon-neutral fuel shipping would need each year by 2050, if the industry were to rely on a single carbon-neutral fuel to replace heavy fuel oil.
Those estimates include 320 million tons of e-methane, 803 million tons of methanol, 859 million tons of green ammonia, 596 million tons of ethanol, or 374 million tons of liquid biofuels, all far exceeding current global production levels. The question is: how can such volumes be produced and delivered at an affordable cost?
A shared origin
These new fuels have one core element in common: green hydrogen, explained Accelleron’s President of Medium and Low-Speed Christoph Rofka at the report launch during London International Shipping Week in September. Industry views increasingly converge around green hydrogen-based e-fuels as the most technically viable carbon-neutral fuels for shipping. However, supplying a fully net zero maritime industry would require vast quantities of green hydrogen, around 100–150 million tons per year by 2050, at an estimated cost of $2 to $3 trillion.
It’s not enough to be big
Even the largest shipping companies today spend roughly $4–6 billion per year on fuel, several factors removed from the trillions required, which explains why company scale alone is still not enough to create an e-fuel supply or spur scaled, global development. A few large companies are securing agreements in one or two locations for a handful of ships, barely a drop in the bucket for the global fleet.
But what if the entire industry consolidated demand for carbon-neutral fuel? It would be a start, but with a global bunker market currently estimated at $125 billion, the combined power of the entire industry would still fall short by a factor of roughly 16 to 24, just to secure green hydrogen feedstock, without the rest of the e-fuel development chain.
This challenge also shapes how the International Maritime Organization’s emerging net zero framework could play out in practice. While the framework is intended to accelerate the transition, it does not, on its own, resolve the question of e-fuel availability at scale. Even with clearer regulatory direction, delivering carbon-neutral fuels globally will still depend on whether demand is consolidated enough to justify investment.
Several other hard-to-abate sectors also require e-fuels to fully decarbonize, a fact that has convinced some industry leaders that early e-fuel competition is too steep for shipping. According to this view, instead of trying to trigger production now, shipping should focus on cheaper, easier transitional fuels and allow sectors with deeper pockets and more immediate need, such as aviation, to lead early market development. Shipping could then step in later, buying more affordably in a more mature and widespread market.
Accelleron tested that assumption through research and interviews for its report. The conclusion was: no single industry can afford to build the e-fuel market alone. The problem isn’t competition, it’s a lack of demand and investment consolidation and coordination, not only within each sector, but also across sectors.
Turning competition into collaboration
WinGD CEO Dominik Schneiter voices one of the key propositions in the report, saying, “if shipping and aviation could work together… that would be a game changer. I think shipping alone is too small.”
That level of coordination has yet to take shape. Aviation, like shipping, remains at an exploratory stage in its journey to net zero. The report also points to the steel and chemical industries, which are pursuing alternative fuels and feedstocks of their own, further splintering early demand.
And it is this very demand uncertainty that complicates investment decisions, and has contributed to a spate of stalled or cancelled green hydrogen and e-fuel projects. According to the International Energy Agency’s Global Hydrogen Review 2025, global hydrogen demand reached nearly 100 million tons in 2024, but low-carbon hydrogen accounts for less than 1% of total production, because of high costs and weak demand signals, a chicken-and-egg problem. Based on announced projects, potential low-carbon hydrogen output by 2030 is now forecast at around 37 million tons per year, down from 49 million just one year ago.
Coordination is essential
Accelleron sets out this situation before proposing a way forward: “Shipping can only succeed in securing green hydrogen feedstock if it coordinates with other sectors.” Aggregating demand across sectors, supported by aligned policy frameworks, “can prevent projects from remaining stranded on paper.”
Locations where this alignment could work include ports such as Amsterdam, where major airports and shipping terminals coexist, positioning them as potential anchor nodes for joint aviation–shipping demand aggregation.
The report also includes a perspective from Dr. Carsten Rolle, Secretary General of the World Energy Council Germany and Director of Energy and Climate Policy at the Federation of German Industries. He says, “This energy transition is about de-risking so many elements at once, and in a somehow synchronized way. And there is a tendency of everyone to wait for the other.”
If everyone does that, Dr. Rolle says, it will not work. “So, it needs a little bit of courage, not to be too early, but also not too late to get the whole thing going.”
The same dynamics that currently block progress could also unlock it, by reframing perceived competition for fuel as an opportunity for collaboration across sectors. Treated this way, fragmented pathways could converge, and a deadlock could become an opportunity to build momentum toward a net-zero future.
To explore how fragmented pathways and other deadlocks can be resolved through cross-sector coordination and demand aggregation, read the full report here.