FURTHER postponing IMO greenhouse gas regulations would be the “worst-case scenario” for the World Shipping Council at MEPC next week, according to the liner association’s new vice president of environment and climate.

Simon Bergulf was previously AP Moller-Maersk’s head of energy transition and Europe regulatory affairs.

The WSC was among several shipowner associations behind a joint statement this week urging governments to stick by the IMO’s 2023 greenhouse gas strategy, despite US pressure to kill off the Net-Zero Framework at MEPC84 next week.

The shipowner groups argued that liner companies have invested billions of dollars in green technology and needed regulatory clarity about the decades ahead.

In an interview with Lloyd’s List, Bergulf said the political tensions at October’s extraordinary MEPC meeting could be seen as reason to “just park everything for a few years”.

But the industry’s investments in greenery meant “it’s not neutral just to park it. It’s actually very negative for the business cases here”.

The IMO could decide to adopt the technical parts of the NZF before the economic parts (which are much more politically contentious), rather than adopt the NZF in full.

But doing nothing would be the “worst-case scenario” for WSC members, because it carried the highest risk of encouraging a patchwork of regional carbon taxes instead of one clear IMO system.

Bergulf said the joint statement’s references to the 2023 GHG Strategy — which commits the IMO to reaching net zero by or around 2050 — were no accident.

“It seems that quite a number of people have forgotten that that has actually been adopted, and it still stands,” he said.  “And what is adopted in there needs to be delivered upon.”

Container lines such as Maersk have been quicker to support green rules than tanker or bulk shipping companies, which are expected to have a harder time decarbonising.

Bergulf acknowledged the operational differences between segments but said this didn’t tell the whole story when it came to who was for or against the NZF.

“I think it’s not as binary, and I’m actually rather convinced that in tramp and in tankers there’s also a number of people that would like to see an ambitious framework coming out of the IMO,” he said.

The WSC supported the NZF when it was provisionally approved a year ago, but said it would need adjustments and clarifications to work.

“Our position is therefore neither ‘Net-Zero Framework at any cost’, nor starting again from scratch,” Bergulf said.

The biggest issues were how to reward companies for using green fuels, how to spend the carbon tax proceeds, and how to classify the emissions of each alternative fuel.

But Bergulf said these problems could be worked out over time.

“How do you eat an elephant? You cut it into pieces,” he said.

Bergulf pointed to the “constructive” tone of technical talks at IMO this week, which suggested countries still wanted to work together.

Past IMO regulations, such as double hulls and the 2020 sulphur cap, had faced similar criticism — that fuel wouldn’t be available, or that the rules wouldn’t be enforced — but had ultimately succeeded.

Bergulf suggested the IMO could move forward on the question of how to treat LNG as fuel by having different emissions ratings depending on the source, rather than one number for the whole industry.

“I can fully understand why Norway, for example, doesn’t think it’s completely fair that their production of LNG is compared to production of LNG elsewhere in the world, where the methane slip is under less control,” he said.

The industry also needed more transparency from the IMO Data Collection System, and a clearer estimate of how much money the Net-Zero Fund would raise, before deciding how to spend it.

“It may be that the first year we expect to get this amount, but we actually end up getting another amount,” he said.

This would require flexibility and patience, at least in the first few years.

“We need to have it running so we know how much is in the pot before we start chopping it up,” Bergulf said.

But none of this would work if the IMO decided to retreat from the green debate. The priority should be to arrive at a framework that closed the price gap between fossil and cleaner fuels, provided regulatory certainty, and triggered investment by fuel producers and the wider supply chain.

“Let’s not throw away a decade of negotiations,” he said.

“We’ve talked about and negotiated so many things in this room that we can’t just throw that away and start from scratch.”