Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use
Key takeaways
- The important result from my rebaselined maritime energy pathway is that fossil fuel cargo is not just large by mass.
- That distinction matters because shipping fuel demand is driven by transport work, not just tons loaded at ports.
- This is the part that fuel-first narratives tend to miss.
June 16, 20265 seconds Michael Barnard 0 Comments Support Clean Technica's work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe. Maritime fuel debates usually start with the wrong object. They look at today’s bunker fuel demand, line up replacement molecules, and ask whether ammonia, methanol, hydrogen, LNG, biofuels, or synthetic fuels can scale far enough to replace it. That sounds like a practical question, but it skips the larger one: how much maritime fuel demand remains after the energy transition changes the cargoes that ships carry.
The important result from my rebaselined maritime energy pathway is that fossil fuel cargo is not just large by mass. It is disproportionately important to shipping energy. Fossil fuels are roughly 40% of maritime tonnage, but in the model they represent about half of maritime freight energy because coal, oil, and gas are mostly long-haul bulk trades. Moving a ton of scrap metal a short distance and moving a ton of oil or LNG across oceans are not the same transport-energy problem, even if both show up as one ton in a cargo table.
That distinction matters because shipping fuel demand is driven by transport work, not just tons loaded at ports. Ton-kilometres are the better mental model. Fossil fuel cargoes travel long distances in very large flows, so their decline removes more than a proportional share of cargo mass. It removes a larger share of the ocean work and the fuel burned to do that work.