Newsletter
A year after FuelEU Maritime took effect, Ahti's CEO shares six lessons on forecasting, pooling and interpretation risk from the first compliance cycle.
A year ago, FuelEU Maritime felt a bit like being handed a beautiful new toy… with the instruction manual delivered in three emails, two spreadsheets, and a 90s era website that triggers a phishing warning.
Now, one full compliance cycle later, I’m mostly grateful: grateful for the customers who trusted us early, for the team that kept building when guidance didn’t, and for the market’s growing willingness to treat decarbonisation as execution, not an opportunity for “thought leadership.”
Here are a few things I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) over the last 12 months:
FuelEU is often introduced as one more annoying, but straightforward compliance task. It’s not. In practice, it quickly becomes a set of commercial decisions: when you lock in fuels; which cargoes you lift; how you price risk in charters; who you pool with…
I’ve heard the same sentence in many forms: “Forecasting is impossible because charterers decide the voyages.” Yes, perfect forecasts are impossible. That doesn’t mean ‘useful forecast’ is an oxymoron.
Even a base estimate, such as last year’s activity, adjusted by your commercial team’s outlook gives you enough to more accurately plan your pooling position; time low-carbon fuel decisions; avoid late-cycle panic; and align internally on what you’re optimising for – this last one often takes much longer than many people think.
Pooling can be brilliant. It can also be an expensive way to learn about contract law. The companies who got the best results this year treated compliance as “cost + counterparty risk + timing.” Not “Let’s find the cheapest €/tCO₂e.”
FuelEU is full of details where a small interpretation can create a big number. The ice-class situation (see here) was a perfect example of how quickly risk gets transferred downstream.
The lesson for me wasn’t “be annoyed” (though that happened). It was: build processes that assume interpretation risk exists; double-check anything that looks “too good to be true”; and don’t pool on numbers you haven’t stress-tested.
In Finland we have a saying: a pessimist is never disappointed. To be good at FuelEU compliance, it’s useful to be a little Finnish.
FuelEU’s first year has shown something important: economists aren’t always wrong.
When regulation creates credible incentives, the market can respond quickly. We’ve seen major acceleration in low-carbon fuel use and offtake momentum, in large part because compliance now has a price tag that can’t be ignored.
I never set out to “be a CEO”. I wanted to work in shipping, build things that matter, and fight emissions.
Administration, accountancy, funding, and HR are vital to a company’s success, but they are not subjects where I magically become more interested just because they’re important.
The way we solved that was simple: we brought in people who are excellent at the things I would otherwise procrastinate. A big thank you for Ahti’s team and board!
It turns out being the CEO is much more rewarding and productive when other people are ensuring the company doesn’t become a science project!