27 MAR 2025
Nick Brown, Chief Executive of LRCredit: Lloyd’s Register
Lloyd’s Register sees a big year ahead for ammonia as a fuel and has positioned itself to support shipping on its wider decarbonisation and digitalisation voyage with LR OneOcean.
Shipping is often accused of being slow when it comes to decarbonisation but its not a view that Lloyd’s Register Chief Executive Nick Brown subscribes to saying that the “industry has done a huge amount”.
In an interview with Seatrade Maritime News ahead of Singapore Maritime Week and Sea Asia 2025 Brown notes that back in 2018 the industry did not really have any deepsea vessels capable of operating on non-hydrocarbon fuels. Over the intervening seven years the industry has worked to develop the technology and its now proven and ready.
Methanol dual-fuelled vessels are already on the water and Brown sees the coming 12 months a big year for ammonia as a fuel. “Hopefully this time next year we should have our first deepsea ammonia fuelled vessels in the water and that will be quite a significant achievement over the next 12 months,” he says.
One of those projects is Newcastlemax bulkers for CMB currently being built at Qingdao Behai due for delivery in first quarter 2026. Brown saw the ammonia dual-fuelled engine under construction at the yard during a visit to China the week prior to the interview, and it is due for testing in the summer. In Beijing he met with the Ministry of Transport and had conversations around the sea trials and bunkering for the new buildings.
So, the ships are arriving into the market, but the big question becomes the availability of green fuels, a growing concern already seen for the hundreds of methanol dual-fuel vessels on order.
“What I worry about actually is we’re going to have zero emission capable ships and nowhere near enough zero emission fuels ready to put in those ships,” Brown says.
While shipping’s move to zero emissions is being driven by a combination of regulations and demand from customers, the availability of low and zero carbon fuels is not something that Brown believes can be driven by regulation.
“It’s something that has to be driven by a business case. And at the moment it doesn’t seem like there is a strong enough business case for the producers of those fuels to make their final investment decisions and go and build a new green or blue fuel production facility.”
One of the drivers though could be green corridors and energy hubs with significant volumes of shipping trading on point-to-point voyages. In the case of the ammonia dual-fuel Newcastlemax bulkers LR’s advisory team is also in discussions with Pilbara Ports in West Australia as they see a green corridor development between the likes of Port Hedland and Qingdao or Dalian in China.
While the availability of low or zero carbon fuels is a concern Brown believes that it has become clear primary production centres will be in Asia, highlighting solar and wind farms in China as a cheap source of electrons.
The drive to decarbonise operations is set to revolutionise shipping in the coming decades combined with the support of digitalisation and this is something the classification has looked to support with is LR OneOcean platform which has grown rapidly over the last few years.
Stressing that classification will always be at the heart of what LR does Brown says they saw an opportunity to support its customers in more than just the steel of the ships and their design, moving into areas such as regulatory compliance, voyage optimisation and training.
“We looked at OneOcean as an opportunity for us to support our customers with having compliant voyages,” he says.
The most recent addition to OneOcean has been Ocean Technologies Group (OTG) which transforms it into the world’s largest provider of seafarer online training.
“Between OneOcean and Ocean Technologies Group we have software now on 30,000 ships. It might just be one element of software which could be for example around digital charts supply or the recording of work and rest hours, but it’s obviously quite a portfolio of solutions that we now hope to offer to the market,” Brown explains.
In terms of expansion of the further One Ocean acquisitions are not on the cards Brown says they are “very content with our portfolio of solutions today”.
However, with it certain that new fuels will be more expensive than the conventional fuels used and an area of focus for organic development at OneOcean is understanding how they can help owners and charterers with voyage optimisation. Key to this Brown says is “being able to crack the nut of just in time arrival”.
Currently ships will sail faster than they need to then just spend time at anchorage waiting to berth at terminals. “Voyage and route optimisation I think is still a big prize for us all as an industry to try and capture. So that’s an area that I think we still have big aspirations to try and support the industry with.”