Maersk has chosen Spain as a strategic location to develop a project with which it intends to produce its own green fuel and position itself at the forefront of the decarbonisation challenge that the maritime sector must tackle, until now the furthest behind in this trend.
Maersk is the second largest shipping company in the world, according to the ranking of the consultancy and maritime data analyst Alphaliner. It has 750 ships, 100,000 employees, 120 countries and 20% of the market share in international transport. The company has been working for months with the Spanish Government to confirm that Spain is a strategic location to produce e-methanol.
"It is a zero-emission sustainable electric fuel that results from a chemical process," explains Carlos Bravo, head of the Transport and environment association in Spain. For its production, green hydrogen is needed (which is obtained through the hydrolysis of water using sustainable energy such as wind or photovoltaic energy) which is then accompanied by the capture of carbon dioxide through chemical processes.
This is a complicated process that is technically very advanced, but that there is still hardly any global production and that, for the moment, is struggling with ammonia to become the green fuel of the future for the world's major means of transport (maritime among them).
The project would involve, as Moncloa sources have confirmed, a total investment of 10,000 million euros and the creation of 4,000 direct jobs, some 35,000 during the construction process and another 40,000 indirect jobs. Currently, the company already has 1,700 employees, 12 ports, 10 cities and 5 maritime terminals. In addition, it would place Spain as a strategic location on the future map of decarbonised transport maritime routes.
The project that is presented today, but whose final details will not be known until mid-2023, plans to develop two production plants that would be located in Andalusia and Galicia to produce two million tons of methanol.
As one of the major international transport companies, the shipping company Maersk has opted to lead the decarbonisation process and has advanced the challenge from 2050 to 2040. Currently, it is one of the largest consumers of fossil fuels with 10 million tons of diesel annual.
The first step to tackle the change has been to order the construction of 19 ships that will work with green e-methanol before 2024 and in the absence of suppliers that guarantee access to this fuel worldwide, Maersk is betting on self-supply.
It is going to need 20 million tons of e-methanol, of which 12 or 13 million they want to produce it themselves in their plants, trusting that by 2030 there will already be other suppliers throughout the world that will allow them to compensate for that difference.
To do this, it plans to develop five or six strategic points around the planet that will allow this fuel to be produced and that its ships can refuel without problems along international maritime routes. The first location announced was Cairo, Egypt. The second, Spain.
The commissioning will take place in phases. The first, until mid-2023, will focus on developing the details of the project. “We have worked together to verify that Spain is a country in which methanol production is profitable, the most profitable in Europe thanks to the efficiency of our production of wind and photovoltaic energy necessary to supply the energy necessary to produce the methanol it needs. Maersk”, Moncloa sources have assured.
It will be followed by a modest start of production with the milestone of producing 200,000 tons before 2025. Between 2025 and 2027 it is expected to produce one million tons of methanol per year.
It will be at that moment that it will be evaluated whether e-methanol wins the battle to become the maritime fuel of the future or if ammonia does. Or they both do. Depending on this technical development, the second Maersk production plant in Spain will focus on one technology or another. If it is e-methanol, it should be used to produce two million tons per year.
It is such a strategic project that in Moncloa they do not rule out that the State ends up taking a symbolic participation in it. What is clear is that Maersk is going to have a red carpet at its feet for the start-up of the project. Moncloa sources rule out that laws will be modified expressly to help the company, but they do acknowledge that it will receive financial injections from the European Recovery Plan Funds. “In addition, there are windows with more aid for hydrogen. Europe is flexible for green hydrogen projects and Maersk has already sounded out some of them”, they say from the Government.
The challenge that both Maersk and the Government will now have to face is the development of the photovoltaic parks that the company will need to feed the production of this new fluid. It is estimated that the company needs to produce about 4,000 megawatts.
From Moncloa they do not want to specify locations but they assure "that they must be scattered throughout Spain to avoid the impact that a single location would have." Against them, there will be no lack of citizen and ecological movements that fight against macro-parks of electricity production.
