The Ship Has Outpaced the Fuel

Methanol's rapid rise has raised questions.

(Article originally published in July/Aug 2026 edition.)

Methanol has moved faster than almost anyone predicted. It overtook LNG as the alternative fuel of choice for newbuilds in 2023, and by mid-2026 class society DNV had counted 313 methanol vessels on order, second only to LNG and part of a pool of more than 450 methanol-capable ships on order or in operation. Thirty-eight were delivered in the first half of 2026 alone.

The maritime industry has largely solved how to burn methanol. The harder work now is integrating, verifying and scaling it.

Two experts, Chris Chatterton of Green Marine Group and Tuomas Häkkinen of Auramarine – one looking at the fuel and the other at the machinery – reach that same conclusion from opposite directions.

GREEN MARINE: THE FUEL IS THE PROBLEM, NOT THE ENGINE

Chris Chatterton, Managing Director & Partner of Singapore-based Green Marine Group, sees a finished propulsion story and a fuel story that has barely begun: "The propulsion side is genuinely mature. Two-stroke, dual-fuel methanol engines from MAN and WinGD are commercially proven. Orderbooks now run into the hundreds of vessels, and yards across Korea and China have de-risked the newbuild process considerably."

What is not solved, he says, is "everything upstream and around the engine: bio-methanol and e-methanol production capacity, port-side bunkering infrastructure outside a handful of first-mover hubs, and the certification chain needed to prove a given cargo of methanol is actually low-carbon rather than grey. In many respects, the ship has outpaced the fuel."

Owners can now buy a methanol-ready ship with confidence. What they cannot yet do reliably is bunker renewable methanol at a price and volume that makes commercial sense on most trade lanes. "The most consequential bottleneck today is not vessel capability but production scale-up against a backdrop of expensive renewable hydrogen and constrained sustainable carbon feedstocks," Chatterton explains, "along with a lack of meaningful policy."

That gap feeds the industry's central blind spot.

"The single biggest blind spot is treating 'methanol-fueled' as synonymous with 'low-carbon' when the underlying feedstock and production pathway is what actually determines emissions performance," he says. "The molecule is not the message."

Grey methanol "is barely better than conventional fuel on a well-to-wake basis once you account for production emissions." Owners and charterers "need to look past 'methanol-fueled' as a marketing claim and ask for the actual certificate: feedstock origin, production pathway, third-party certification and the calculated GHG intensity value under FuelEU Maritime or IMO's forthcoming Sustainable Fuel Certification Scheme framework. Without that documentation, 'methanol-fueled' tells you nothing about actual emissions performance."

The "just like diesel" framing is what worries him most. "Methanol is toxic on contact and inhalation," he notes, "and it burns with a flame that is nearly invisible in daylight – properties diesel crews have never had to manage. The liquid-at-ambient-temperature simplicity is relative, not absolute. Closed-loop bunkering connections, methanol-specific gas detection, PPE, ventilation in enclosed spaces and revised emergency response procedures are all non-negotiable additions. The 'just like diesel' framing risks under-preparing crews and ports precisely because it sounds so reassuring."

Fuel flexibility draws the same verdict because "no owner should be expected to bunker only green methanol from day one when the supply doesn't exist."

Vessel capability gets reported and perceived as decarbonization progress when the fuel actually consumed remains predominantly fossil, he says. Regulators and reporting frameworks need to track actual fuel consumed and its verified lifecycle intensity, not nameplate engine capability. Otherwise, the industry risks a credibility gap once external stakeholders start asking for actual emissions data rather than fleet composition statistics.

Training must move from "a compliance checkbox" to "an operational competency built over repeated cycles, the way tanker crews build chemical-handling competence over years, not weeks."

Ethanol, he thinks, is under-assessed for a structural reason: "Methanol and marine biofuel demand increasingly compete with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) for the same constrained used cooking oil (UCO) and lipid feedstocks. Ethanol draws on a structurally separate agricultural supply lane, so it doesn't compete head-to-head with aviation for the same scarce inputs."

He flags a policy incoherence: "Crop-based ethanol is currently excluded from eligibility under FuelEU Maritime while CORSIA accepts crop-based feedstocks for aviation SAF." He frames it as complementary: "Different regions and different feedstock bases will likely favor one over the other."

Verification, he says, is "the least mature part of the entire methanol value chain," and the problems compound – inconsistent chain-of-custody approaches, a proliferation of voluntary certification schemes that do not yet interoperate with IMO's own forthcoming Sustainable Fuel Certification Scheme, and limited digital infrastructure for transferring verified certificates across bunkering, trading and reporting parties without manual reconciliation.

A trusted monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) platform, he argues, must align with IMO and FuelEU methodologies at once, prove tamper-evident chain-of-custody from feedstock to bunker delivery, interoperate with existing certification bodies and offer auditability that regulators, not just industry consortia, are willing to rely on.

"Until that exists," Chatterton concludes, "every actor in the chain is effectively trusting paper certificates and counterparty reputation."

AURAMARINE: ENGINEERING THE COMPLETE FUEL SYSTEM

Where Chatterton describes the fuel problem, Tuomas Häkkinen of Finland-based fuel-systems specialist Auramarine describes the machinery, starting by puncturing a phrase owners lean on.

"'Methanol-ready' often means a vessel has reserved space and structural provision for a future fuel supply system like tank arrangement, tank coating, pipe routing and some electrical capacity," he says. "That is reserved space for system installation, not a delivered system."

A genuinely capable vessel, he states, carries a complete, certified fuel supply chain, a fuel supply unit delivering methanol at the pressure, temperature and flow the engine requires, double-wall piping, gas and leak detection, and automation with emergency shutdown logic, all tested and integrated, with crew trained in methanol-specific procedures.

The danger lives at the interfaces: the ship-to-shore bunkering connection, fuel conditioning, the link between engine and fuel supply system under transient load and the automation tying emergency shutdown into the vessel's alarm system. Project risk grows when responsibility for these interfaces is not clearly assigned, he says. A shipyard owning the piping, one supplier the fuel system and another the automation leaves a gap at every handover.

He warns that the neglected half is software, not steel.

"Coordination should begin during the concept and contract design phases, well before detailed engineering or steel cutting starts," he states. Leave it late, and the result is insufficient space, tank arrangements that conflict with IGF Code separation requirements, automation not prepared for the fuel system's cause-and-effect logic and rushed commissioning. Retrofits are harder still, almost always bounded by space, which makes fitting tanks, cofferdams, a fuel preparation room and the supply unit into an existing hull a case-by-case problem rather than a template.

His strongest message is about integration.

"The true challenge is not the individual components, but ensuring the right actions occur automatically when a fault is detected," Häkkinen says. A well-designed system gives every critical subsystem a predictable fallback in the cause-and-effect matrix. Where Chatterton says crews must be trained to react, Häkkinen's point is that the automation must already know what to do. The two are different halves of one safety case.

They converge again on data.

The onboard information largely exists: A fuel supply system already captures bunkered volume and quality at intake, flow and consumption at the engine and time-stamped changeover events. "The biggest gap today is often not data availability, but data traceability and consistency across different onboard systems," Häkkinen says.

Two experts, working from opposite ends of the same fuel, describe the same challenge: The industry has learned how to burn methanol. It has yet to learn how to build the integration, verification and trust to prove what it's actually burning.

The remaining barriers are no longer mechanical. They're digital, procedural and systemic.

Sean M. Holt is a regular contributor for The Maritime Executive and writes from Southeast Asia.

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.