Andrea Lazzaro, head of business development at the marine engine designer WinGD, told Ship & Bunker in an interview published in March that some of his customers “have told me that at green methanol prices peaking at $2,500 per tonne, I can’t have any business,” and that ethanol “can really be the game-changer there, because it’s cheaper and it’s available, if they let us use it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A.P. Moller – Maersk has since fueled one of its new methanol-capable ships with American corn ethanol, and the company says the job was the first ship-to-ship commercial ethanol bunkering of a deep-sea container vessel in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ship was Tangier Maersk, a “dual-fuel alcohol-enabled container vessel” as Maersk puts it, the fuel was 100 percent U.S.-produced corn ethanol, and the announcement came on September 28, 2026, the same day a national laboratory put out a 50-page report on how far ethanol could go as a fuel for ocean shipping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bunkering is the old shipping word for refueling, and in a ship-to-ship job like this one the fuel gets pumped over from a barge or tanker moored alongside instead of coming down a pipeline on the dock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
gCaptain reported that Tangier Maersk is a 9,016-TEU containership, delivered earlier this year with an alcohol-capable dual-fuel engine, and the first in a series of new mid-sized dual-fuel ships joining the Maersk fleet, with TEU, or twenty-foot equivalent unit, being the box count the industry uses to say how many containers a ship can carry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Maritime Executive added that she was built in China, delivered in February and measures about 900 feet (270 meters), roughly the length of three football fields laid end to end, and methanol-capable ships like her are the kind Lazzaro was talking about back in March, when he told Ship & Bunker that “in the last six months there has been a lot of interest in the methanol-ethanol capability.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
POET, the South Dakota company that calls itself the world’s largest bioethanol producer, supplied the fuel, and its own announcement<\/a> said the trial “took place in Houston,” with Kirby Corporation running “the marine bunkering operation and transportation of the fuel,” the Port of Houston providing “critical port coordination and infrastructure,” and the U.S. Coast Guard supporting “the regulatory requirements necessary” for the operation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ship & Bunker noticed that the POET release left out the vessel’s name, the date of the operation and the volume of fuel delivered, while Maersk’s own release doesn’t name a port, and the photo Maersk sent around shows Tangier Maersk at the Port of Mobile in Alabama.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat Maersk says it got out of it<\/h2>\n\n\n\n