Seanergy Maritime Holdings Corp. believes reducing fuel consumption is a more practical way to improve sustainability than switching to new fuels. The company’s CEO, Stamatis Tsantanis, says that the current options for alternative fuels are limited, according to S&P Global.
Innovative Ideas
This comes amid slow take-up across the shipping sector; analysts at S&P Global Commodity Insights expect alternative fuels’ share of the overall bunker demand mix, excluding LNG and LPG, to inch up from 0.6% in 2022 to 7.8% by 2030.
“We strongly believe that there’s no real viable innovative idea on the table right now for the vast majority of the existing fleet which is sustainable, and most importantly, that is risk-free,” Stamatis Tsantanis, CEO of Seanergy told Commodity Insights.
The company decided in 2015 that it would try and run its ships more economically and will focus on ideas and solutions that have been tested and which it knows work, such as silicon paint.
According to market observers, bulkers and container vessels will have the most difficulty reconciling cargo space with combustion equipment of the different shipping sectors.
Seanergy is doing what it can when it can. “Whenever any of our ships got into the dry dock, we started to install energy saving devices in cooperation with the charterers, that either pay the cost and they get the benefit or we pay the cost and we share the benefit,” Tsantanis said.
Maintaining the Age Profile
Seanergy’s fleet of 19 vessels currently has an average age of 13.4 years, a fairly senior age profile that may not change soon.
While in the aviation sector bigger, more fuel-efficient planes are being built with lighter materials that reduce fuel burn, for shipping, newer engines are not materially more efficient than the previous generations. Even some of Seanergy’s older vessels from 2004 perform quite well on fuel efficiency, Tsantanis said.
Amortizing the carbon cost of building a new ship, including the impact of emissions from the steel and energy used to build it, may not make the mine-to-wake process worth the emissions, compared to burning slightly more fuel, Tsantanis said.
In any case, it can be hard to get in orders at shipyards: “There are not so many shipyards in the world that can build Capesize vessels, and those that do, they tend to choose vessels that have bigger profit margins,” he said.
Market Boosts
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting slew of international sanctions has forced Europe to import more commodities from other, further-flung sources.
This has been visibly the case for refined oil products, although it has been less pronounced in the case of coal. In 2021, before the invasion, Europe imported 3.9 million mt of coal, dropping to 3.1 million mt in 2022, before roughly halving to 1.7 million mt/year in both 2023 and in 2024 to date, according to S&P Global Commodities at Sea data. The hope within the dry bulk sector was that the Russian volumes that were displaced would come from more distant sources.
“Initially, that didn’t happen and the reason it didn’t happen is because we had one of the mildest winters in history,” Tsantanis said. He added that coal inventories are depleting and that more coal is starting to come from further afield, such as from Australia.
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Source: S&P Global
