THE Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance will focus exclusively on spurring e-fuel development with its next tender for green shipping services in January 2025.

It will seek three- to five-year contracts with carriers for e-fuel powered container shipping starting in 2027, and bids that cut primary propulsion emissions by at least 90%.

Zemba will seek bids from individual carriers or consortia, and it is open to having multiple winners.

“Zemba is making history by voluntarily catalysing commercial e-fuel development through our next collective tender,” chief executive Ingrid Irigoyen said.

“Our members are demonstrating that freight buyers are willing to make multi-year advanced offtake commitments now to incentivise the creation of new markets for the most scalable solutions, which will be required for them to achieve their 2030 and 2040 climate goals.”

Zemba, a club of 40 freight buyers, said it wants to aggregate at least 80bn tonne-miles of demand for emissions abatement from container shipping starting in 2027.

This would equate to 1.4m teu carried across the Pacific by e-fuels, assuming a benchmark distance of Shanghai to Los Angeles.

The scheme is meant to get around the problem of customers’ reluctance to shell out for zero-carbon container shipping.

E-fuels are made by splitting hydrogen from water in an electrolyser and combining it with nitrogen (to make ammonia) or captured carbon (to make methane or methanol).

This is expected to be far costlier than making biofuels, but easier to scale up in the long run. The problem is that fuel makers are loath to make the pricier fuels without first being sure of a market for them.

Zemba’s idea is to create such a market by pooling demand from freight buyers seeking to decarbonise their own supply chains, leaving it to carriers to find ways to offer the green service.

German liner Hapag-Lloyd won the first Zemba tender in April by using bio-LNG from waste.

There were no bids for e-fuels the first time round, hence Zemba’s focus on them now. Zemba has published research on challenges to e-fuels.

Interested bidders can contact [email protected] to prepare for the Request for Proposal with details on Zemba’s new website.

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