The Commission's rewrite of the shipping carbon market is expected in the coming days, and the three developments this week tell the story of the pressure building against it. Owners want the scheme's exemptions locked in for good and widened. A Maritime Watch reading of the compliance register shows the administrative load piling onto three states while the money flows to others entirely. And in the Netherlands, a fuel that decarbonisation is meant to run on is being blamed for stalling engines.
The register that doubled. Three countries — Germany, Greece and Spain — now police the carbon compliance of nearly six in ten of the more than 5,300 owners and managers on the EU register, which has more than doubled since it was drawn up in 2024. Germany's leap to the top is a quirk of corporate structure: a good share of German fleets are owned through single-ship companies, each a separate legal entity with its own line on the list, so one shipping firm shows up 121 times. Collapse those and Greece is the busiest administrator in real terms. The genuinely awkward finding is that workload and money point in opposite directions — Czechia administers not a single shipping company yet collects an estimated €376 million in shipping auction revenue, more than either the Netherlands or Belgium, while Greece ranks only sixth for revenue. The concentration is real; the burden, as the executive clarified back in 2024, is administrative allocation rather than a change in who actually owes what. The question the revision leaves open is whether the money is ever meant to follow the ships.
The exemptions campaign hardens. European Shipowners want the reliefs the sector already enjoys, for island ferry links, ice-strengthened ships, the outermost regions and certain public-service ferry routes, made permanent rather than lapsing at the end of 2030, and made automatic so they apply on the same terms in every Member State rather than waiting on each government to switch them on. As things stand a government has to ask for the small-islands relief, and owners say near-identical routes end up taxed differently either side of a border. They want it to "automatically apply and not depend on the Member States' decision to activate them", widened to all islands regardless of population, to the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, and, for the first time, to search and rescue voyages. This is the latest move in an exemptions campaign that has lengthened all spring. Tellingly, owners are not asking for the carbon market's geographical reach to be cut: the trade they are offering to price is the terms, not the scope.
Decarbonisation misfiring at the pump. A Dutch skippers' association is telling barge owners to refuse the biodiesel the country's renewable-energy rules require, after a run of incidents in which clogged filters and stalled engines left vessels without power, a hazard it calls especially acute for barges carrying dangerous goods. It blames FAME, the cheap fatty-acid biodiesel, and the used frying fat increasingly used to make it, and wants only fossil diesel or the cleaner HVO. The sector will decarbonise, the association says, "but only in a way that is safe, reliable and affordable". The row has now reached the European Parliament, where a Dutch MEP has asked the Commission whether fuel that meets the EU's own quality standards can still wreck an engine under normal use.
The ETS revision proposal itself is expected shortly; once tabled it passes to the Council and the Parliament, where the exemptions fight will be settled.
See also: Shipowners break down ETS revenue by Member State · Calls for ETS island relief grow as freight costs rise · Portugal and Greece add to growing list of FuelEU island exemptions