The shipping industry didn’t turn to LNG out of some noble urge to “decarbonize.” It turned to LNG because it needed a fuel that ticks the requisite green boxes while still actually working—a fuel they can keep using long after the carbon hysteria burns itself out. And it will burn out; they know it, even if they don’t say it aloud.
LNG as marine fuel isn’t some newborn child of climate panic. It’s been around for decades, a clean heir to replace the truly vile Heavy Fuel Oil—HFO, the sludge that required grotesquely complex and expensive aftertreatment just to make it marginally tolerable. LNG needs none of that. And if you can market it as the road to carbon salvation while you’re at it, well—that’s just cream on the profit pudding.In shipping—and increasingly on the road—LNG is the logical next vertebra in the backbone of global transport. Diesel isn’t going to vanish tomorrow, or even in the next decade. But it may have already crested its hill. Or perhaps it’s standing right on the summit, squinting at the long slope down.