The US and Norway launched the Green Shipping Challenge in Sharm el-Sheikh this month. The Challenge encompasses more than forty different announcements & initiatives, including ammonia fuel production in Namibia, ammonia-powered cargo shipping in Finland, ammonia-powered pilot vessels in Norway's Green Shipping Programme, and a host of new green corridor projects. A trio of new reports have also provided an assessment of progress to date in green corridor development, and suggested key next steps.

Since the Clydebank Declaration was signed last December, the prospect of ammonia-fueled, green maritime corridors has been steadily rising. The Global Maritime Forum has just released a valuable discussion paper on potential definitions and approaches for green corridors. Recent announcements in Europe, Singapore, Australia and the Nordic countries demonstrate growing momentum. For maritime stakeholders to capture early learnings and best manage the complex task of alternative maritime fuel scale-up, the opportune time is right now.

In three green maritime corridor announcements this week:

• Chile’s Ministry of Energy and the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping will develop a network of transport corridors in and out of the country.
• The Global Maritime Forum will lead an Australian consortium seeking to establish ammonia-powered iron ore transport routes between Australia and southeast Asia.
• and the US State Department has outlined its official approach to green corridors, describing them as a “key means of spurring the early adoption of zero-emission fuels” like ammonia.

In January 2022, UMAS and the Getting To Zero Coalition (GtZC) released a report with policy options for closing the competitiveness gap between conventional & future maritime fuels. Such measures will be necessary to enable an equitable transition to zero-emissions shipping. So how might these potential policy routes may impact and enable the scaling of maritime ammonia?

Two maritime ammonia heavyweights - the Global Centre for Maritime Decarbonisation and the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center - have signed a long-term agreement to accelerate the maritime industry’s decarbonisation efforts. The Global Centre for Maritime Decarbonisation is currently overseeing a comprehensive ammonia bunkering study that will enable ammonia bunkering trials to proceed at two Singapore locations to start in 2023.

The ports of Los Angeles and Shanghai have announced the intention to create a green shipping corridor across the Pacific Ocean. The ambition is for ships trading between these ports to run on alternative low greenhouse gas emission fuels. Ammonia stands among the options as such an alternative.

There is a clear willingness from key players at the LA end of this trans-Pacific shipping corridor to embrace alternative fuel solutions and work together to unlock a suite of zero emissions technologies, albeit limited to an onshore focus for now. Shifting focus onto the water - where ammonia maritime fuel will undoubtedly play a critical role - is the logical next step.

Welcome to the Ammonia Wrap: a summary of all the latest announcements, news items and publications about ammonia energy. This week: latest report from NoGAPS, Viking Energy project takes another step, more collaborations for Yara, thyssenkrupp to invest in cracking R&D, investment in clean hydrogen technology in the USA, world-first visualisation of ammonia combustion in a spark-ignition engine and our numbers of the week.

Welcome to the Ammonia Wrap: a summary of all the latest announcements, news items and publications about ammonia energy. This week: OCI to charter ammonia-fueled vessels, new carbon-free maritime fuels forecast, Hokkaido Electric postpones CCGT deployment, awaits ammonia, more green ammonia for Chile, Net-zero Teesside to include CF Industries ammonia production, South Korea and Uruguay.

At least four major maritime ammonia projects have been announced in the last few weeks, each of which aims to demonstrate an ammonia-fueled vessel operating at sea. In Norway, Color Fantasy, the world's largest RORO cruise liner, will pilot ammonia fuel. Across the broader Nordic region, the Global Maritime Forum has launched NoGAPS, a major consortium that aims to deploy "the world's first ammonia powered deep sea vessel" by 2025. In Japan, a new industry consortium has launched that goes beyond on-board ship technology to include "owning and operating the ships, supplying ammonia fuel and developing ammonia supply facilities." And the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), which published its roadmap last month, aims to demonstrate ammonia fuel on "an actual ship from 2028" — specifically, a 80,000 dwt ammonia-fueled bulk carrier.

In January 2020, the Global Maritime Forum published new analysis that calculates "the capital investment needed to achieve decarbonization" in line with the International Maritime Organization's Initial GHG Strategy. The result of this analysis, which assumes that ammonia will be "the primary zero carbon fuel choice adopted by the shipping industry," is an aggregate investment of between $1 trillion and $1.4 trillion dollars, from 2030 to 2050, or roughly $50 to $70 billion per year across two decades. Ship-side costs are only 13% of this number. The bulk of the investment will be directed towards green ammonia plants for maritime fuel synthesis. By 2050, this global fuel demand is estimated to be more than 900 million tons per year of green ammonia, more than five time today's total global output of conventional ammonia.