The European Commission has finally proposed the defence Europe's ports spent three years demanding, while still declining to concede that the danger it guards against is real. Its proposed revision of the maritime ETS, published on 17 July, would widen the blacklist of neighbouring non-EU ports whose calls no longer shorten a priced voyage (dropping the transshipment threshold from 65% to 50% and adding any deep-water port within 150 nautical miles) and would hand the largest container ships a discount on cargo they merely tranship through an EU port until the end of 2035. Yet the impact assessment underneath it restates the executive's long-held finding that it has seen no major traffic shift attributable to the scheme, framing the new measures throughout as insurance against a risk rather than a remedy for a proven harm.
This is a proposal built to satisfy a political demand. Nine Member States, the Italian and Spanish governments, the port bodies and transport ministers in writing had all pressed for corrective action; the Commission has offered the correction while keeping its position intact, proposing to cut surrender requirements on exactly the voyages the same climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, had in 2023 floated raising them for. The port associations that called for the protection (FEPORT, ESPO) say it still won't stop diversion, the container lines it constrains (the World Shipping Council) say it penalises neighbours for merely having deep water, and Transport & Environment calls the transhipment discount a dangerous loophole. A measure doubted from every direction at once is either a careful compromise or a fudge, and none of it is fixed: as a proposal it now goes to the Parliament and Council, where every figure in it is open to amendment.
The 'buy European' turn.
The same proposal would quietly import industrial policy into the carbon market. A reserve of up to 110 million allowances would cover a large share of the price gap between cleaner fuels and conventional bunkers (90% for e-fuels, less for biofuels) but only for fuel produced in the EU or in linked or supported third countries, with clean propulsion eligible only if built in those same places and a bonus for equipment fitted in EU shipyards. It would answer European Shipowners' long campaign for "earmarking" only in part: Member States would have to spend half their auction revenue on the sectors the scheme covers, and could in theory satisfy that through aid to steel and cement while sending shipping nothing. ECSA, which puts the reserve at roughly €10 billion against the €90 billion it expects the sector to pay in between 2030 and 2040, welcomed the origin-based support and called the package a first step; Transport & Environment warned it will steer money toward biofuels rather than the scalable e-fuels and battery power it wants.
Also on the security file.
The IMO's secretary-general Arsenio Dominguez told MEPs on 15 July that no international law permits tolls on straits used for international navigation, and raised the voluntary cooperation mechanism in the Strait of Malacca and Singapore (funded by the maritime community, with nothing charged for passage) as a model that could be looked at for Hormuz later. In the same session the Commission put the number of "vessels of EU interest" in the Persian Gulf at around 350, with over 6,000 seafarers still stranded, figures the ship-managers' body InterManager continues to dispute.
There is much more in the week's coverage, including Brussels declining to join the IMO's condemnation of the drone attacks on merchant ships in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. All of it sits in the Maritime Watch archive, now more than five thousand articles deep, at maritimewatch.eu. Not yet a subscriber? Reply to this email or write to editor@maritimewatch.eu and we'll set up a free trial.