How shipping should be buying clean technology

How shipping should be buying clean technology

in International Shipping News,Shipping: Emission Possible 10/06/2026

Most of the performance figures the industry currently uses when purchasing clean technologies are recorded under controlled conditions, on a single hull, and during favourable operating windows. In air lubrication, the standard reference points are often taken from sea trials held in light or ballast conditions, where compressors have less hydrostatic pressure to work against and the system can be presented in its most flattering light. In other words, what those results say about a different ship, at a different level of load and on a different trade is far less than the headline saving figure might imply.

Independent findings now bear this out. An insights summary published this year by the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping – drawn from owners and charterers operating active, compressor-driven systems – reported real-world net savings ranging from zero to six per cent, varying with hull form, draught, speed and sea state. That is a meaningful divergence from the figures the market is routinely shown, and a reminder that a single headline number tells an owner very little about how a system will behave on their ship.

The result is a procurement environment in which owners cannot confidently choose between the systems they are shown. Some have stopped buying altogether, waiting for the evidence base to mature. That is bad for shipping’s decarbonisation trajectory, and it is bad for the credible suppliers who have invested in real engineering and now find themselves competing in a market that reads only headline figures. It is, at root, a credibility gap – and it widens every time a system underperforms a broad promise made on paper. That is why shipowners should change the question they ask. Instead of ‘what has this system achieved in someone else’s test conditions?’, they should be asking ‘what do you predict it will do on my ship, in my trades, at the draughts and speeds I actually operate?’ Vessel-specific evidence should be the baseline expectation before any CAPEX is committed, and a system that cannot be modelled to that level of specificity should not be bought.

This matters more now because the way ships are operated has shifted under the owners’ feet. Tightening carbon intensity regulations and volatile fuel costs are pushing vessels into slower, more variable steaming, and ships now spend significant time below the design speeds at which headline figures are typically recorded. A technology that performs in a narrow speed band is a very different proposition from one engineered to deliver across the full range of speeds and conditions in which a ship is actually operated.

Most compressor-based, cavity-style air lubrication systems are built around a narrow productive window; below its lower threshold they are designed to drop out of useful operation, their compressors working only to keep cavities filled rather than to generate net savings. A vessel with high-speed legs and slow ballast returns therefore spends much of its time in conditions where such first-generation systems deliver little or no upside. Coincidentally, these trading patterns are precisely the conditions that regulatory compliance is steering the global fleet towards. Armada has engineered its Passive Air Lubrication System (PALS) to answer that: it uses the vessel’s own forward motion to draw and distribute air, with no compressor, so it keeps delivering positive net performance across exactly those slower, variable profiles.

However, building an improved system is only half the argument. Producing credible evidence for a specific ship is fundamentally an accuracy problem: how will a system behave on a hull it has not yet been installed on, at the integration an owner is proposing, under their real operating envelope? That cannot be answered by repeating what the technology has done elsewhere. A large install base is not the same as depth of understanding and, fundamentally, a high volume of orders on a single vessel type is simply repeated data on an unrepresentative sample of individual vessels.

Answering this challenge requires robust experimentation and a modelling programme built around the variables that govern performance: full-scale cavitation tunnel testing on individual pods, model-scale towing tank work across multiple hull forms, full-scale pilot installations and multi-phase CFD analysis, corroborated independently by industry leading partners.

That foundation is what lets a supplier stand behind its predictions contractually – and ultimately what enables them to bring performance guarantees, with commercial consequences for under-delivery into the conversation. In a market where claims have routinely outpaced what can be verified on the ship in front of the owner, that willingness is the clearest signal that a supplier’s modelling can be trusted.

Shipping’s decarbonisation depends on owners being able to believe what they are sold. That begins with shipowners demanding the right evidence – and that they remain unwilling to commit a single pound of CAPEX without it. Source: By Alex Routledge, CEO, Armada Technologies