Successful Maritime Decarbonization Requires Ground Level Investment in Clean Fuels on the US West Coast

By Mike Jacob, President, Pacific Merchant Shipping Association

Everyone knows the old adage of environmental sustainability "Think Globally, Act Locally." But for local and state policymakers, this means taking steps to translate global policy goals with undefined, unknown, long-term, and potentially indistinguishable benefits into local actions which have real, immediate, known, and short-term costs with potentially no locally distinguishable benefits.  This leaves thinking globally much easier said, and acting locally much harder to be done.

In the air quality and decarbonization policy space, the maritime industry is doing its part to make its commitments real. The leadership demonstrated in our commitments to decarbonize to net-zero carbon fleet operations by 2050 were not only impressive and aggressive, but we have backed them up with real and significant investments.  As described in the latest updates to the World Shipping Council's dual-fuel vessel dashboard, the container shipping fleet has already delivered over 400 vessels and has another 800 vessels on order that can utilize sustainable maritime fuels, like LNG, methanol, and ammonia.

Growing at 28% year-over-year, this may be one of the fastest global cascades of new capital into a voluntary decarbonization effort by private industry that has ever occurred. 

These commitments demonstrate that it is possible to both think about how to tackle problems that are expensive, complicated, and require long-term solutions in the abstract, and then to begin to execute actions to meet these challenges through strategic investment.

We're doing our part to build the vessels capable of utilizing the alternative fuels necessary to decarbonize.  Now we need federal, state, and local policymakers to facilitate the planning and investment in the energy infrastructure necessary to provide us with the actual fuel.

In light of the ongoing fuels crisis, especially the climate in a state where we are losing refineries and can't even muster the ability to source our own local energy supplies, these are tough conversations to have.  State leadership has also sent mixed signals on where they stand on creating sustainable maritime fuel supplies to match our industry decarbonization commitments.  In Washington, former Governor Inslee and the environmental community first encouraged the development of liquified natural gas terminals at the Port of Tacoma, in particular to support the domestic Alaska trade, and other methanol production facilities; but then did a complete about face, ironically citing environmental concerns about global warming as the reason to abandon the projects that are critical to our industry's successful pathway to decarbonization. In California, we have an unfortunate lack of consensus on the need to do planning to support maritime industry energy needs in the state; while the state legislature nearly unanimously endorsed a PMSA-request to kick off an alternative fuel study and planning process, Governor Newsom vetoed the bill and wanted the question addressed in a future regulatory context. 

In short, both states on the US West Coast lack commitments to act locally, the hard part.  Ironically, this failure to act locally actually serves to increase emissions.  Consider that LNG refueling vessels on the west coast are exclusively out of Canada which means they have to transit to and from California or Puget Sound in order to provide LNG.

This week much of the environmental policy world was in New York for UN Climate Week meetings, including leaders from both Washington and California, to further debate climate goals and express angst and uncertainty over global issues. Fine, but not PMSA. We headed to Houston to attend a conference on the development of sustainable maritime fuels infrastructure, to express concerns about our lack of infrastructure, to meet with potential fuel providers, and to talk about the nuts and bolts of what is necessary to get new investment in California and Washington to meet our future fuel demand. Given the issues and lack of clear commitments, it is an uphill battle - but we have little alternative.

In the face of ongoing industry commitments to put our money where our mouth is, we need policymakers at every level of government to lead, be proactive, work with fuel providers and facilitate action to spur investment in sustainable maritime fuel supply infrastructure.  We need production, distribution, and delivery systems.  These are no longer hypothetical issues, they are real world needs that currently exist and are growing because the industry is already globally committed to investments in these proven, decided, and technologically feasible pathways to decarbonization.  While we welcome everyone to join us in our thinking about our net zero 2050 goals, it is more imperative that they join us in acting locally to make the investments that make reaching this goal possible.