Maersk Delivers $150 Million PR Win For Shipping Industry With Methanol Ships Purchase
The global industry is responsible for about 3.1% of global CO2 emissions, and that number goes up when you consider black carbon emissions, as the soot and unburned hydrocarbons have a 20-year global warming potential (GWP) of 4,470, and a 100-year GWP of 1,055–2,240. Yes, our Amazon purchases and salads come with a carbon debt.
So what is Maersk doing? It has ordered 8 post-Panamax container ships able to carry 15,000 containers each from South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries, with delivery scheduled for 2024. The ships will be able to burn methanol or bunker fuel in their engines. The methanol is supposed to be carbon-neutral.
However, Maersk runs over 700 ships, so the 8 ships powered by methanol drive trains represent about 1% of its fleet. Not exactly getting rid of bunker fuel rapidly.
Methanol is interesting as a fuel choice. It’s made from natural gas via one of the steam reformation processes, similar to hydrogen in that regard. About a ton of CO2 is produced for every ton of methanol that’s produced, and right now 0% of that is captured. When a ton of methanol is burned, another 0.6 tons of CO2 is emitted. Maersk’s press release talks about carbon-neutral methanol, which suggests using flue carbon capture and follow-on sequestration of the CO2 produced in the steam reformation process.
Bubble diagram of scale of CO2 problem versus capture and use by author
As I’ve published extensively on global carbon capture and sequestration schemes, I’m confident in saying that approaching 0% of CO2 from methanol manufacturing from natural gas and burning as a fuel will be captured, used, and sequestered in the future.
The energy density of methanol is interesting too. The energy density of bunker fuels is about the same as the diesel cited in the linked source. Methanol requires a lot more space and weight on a ship for the same kilometers traveled than traditional fuels.
Running at the cruising speed of 20–25 knots, a Panamax container ship will use about 63,000 gallons of marine fuel every single day. Assuming US gallons (they are smaller, so this is the conservative choice), that’s about 240 tons of fuel a day with diesel or bunker oil. Freighter ships average 40–50 days of travel, although some of that is at lower speeds where fuel consumption drops dramatically. Assuming 40 days, that’s close to 10,000 tons of fuel.
For methanol, basically double that to 20,000 tons of fuel, and comparably less cargo space. Methanol from natural gas with no carbon capture costs over double what bunker fuel does too, over $1 per gallon compared to around $0.50 per gallon.
That means that the same journey will cost 4 times as much in fuel costs, and emit a bunch of CO2 as well.
What methanol does provide is a cleaner-burning fuel. Bunker fuel is nasty stuff, and ships typically get the cheapest, lowest grade, barely refined crap that they can buy. Black carbon — soot and unburned hydrocarbons — is a major pollutant and has an enormous global warming potential as noted above. Vastly less black carbon from methanol than bunker fuel. Ditto sulfur, which is another noxious substance from ships with acid rain implications. Finally, there is high global warming potential nitrous oxide, which is much lower than with bunker fuel.
Right now ships have scrubbers that capture a bunch of the sulfur, particulates, and nitrous oxide, at least when they are operating. Having spoken to an engineer who designs, builds, and installs them on ships, a big focus is on getting the smokestack emissions to look white, like water vapor. The appearance of cleanliness, if not actual cleanliness.
CO2 still gets emitted, however. The CO2 per unit of methanol burned is about 40% of bunker fuel, however, since you need to burn twice as much of it to get the same energy, it’s about 80% of emissions. This isn’t a CO2 saving that’s worth writing home about if the methanol is made from natural gas. It’s more of a value proposition if the CO2 is captured from flue gas or the air or vegetation, but that leads to the very high cost of “green,” synthetic methanol.
It’s possible to manufacture methanol that’s green-ish. You could capture CO2 from somewhere, crack water with electricity to create the hydrogen, and then merge them into methanol. I went deep on this a couple of years ago when looking at Carbon Engineering, a direct air capture fig leaf for various fossil fuel companies.
Table of green methanol manufacturing by author
That turns out to be close to $3 per gallon solely for manufacturing cost in the best case scenario, compared to the just over $1 for natural gas-sourced methanol. Instead of 4x costs for a journey for fuel, it would be 12x costs.
Let’s put this in perspective. Today with the cheapest bunker fuel that you can get, fuel costs represent 50% to 60% of operational costs. Methanol from natural gas without carbon capture makes that about 80%. Methanol from natural gas with carbon capture would make it approach 90%. Green methanol makes it well over 90%.
So will the shipping world sit up and take notice of Maersk buying 8 methanol powered ships? Yes, they will. They know the math and economics much better than I do, as they live it every day. They know that the 8 ships represent a fig leaf for Maersk. They will note that the ships are dual fuel, able to run on methanol or on bunker fuel, and will know that outside of demonstration runs, Maersk will operate them entirely on bunker fuel for the vast majority of their service life.
They will likely be glad that Maersk is doing PR for the global shipping industry. And there won’t be a big lineup for South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries services to build more of them at 10–15% markups on normal ship construction costs.
Long-haul shipping remains a hard problem for decarbonization. Maersk’s purchase isn’t going to address it. The roughly $150 million extra that it paid for the 8 ships is about 0.4% of Maersk’s annual revenues, or about 1.5% of its expected 2021 profits. This is in the range of expenditures by fossil fuel majors on carbon capture, which is to say PR fig leaf territory, and the ships will undoubtedly run on bunker fuel, not methanol, for the vast majority of their freight miles.
Featured image credit: Maersk
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Metro Detroit is about to get a big boost of fast EV chargers, with more than 40 new ChargePoint ports set to come online across multiple sites owned by the Dabaja Brothers Development Group.
The first ultra-fast charging site just opened in Canton, Michigan. It’s owned and operated by Dabaja Brothers, who plan to follow it with additional ChargePoint-equipped locations in Dearborn and Livonia.
“We started this project because we saw a gap in our community – there was almost nowhere to charge an EV in Canton, and a similar lack of charging across metro Detroit,” said Yousef Dabaja, owner/operator at Dabaja Brothers.
Each metro Detroit site will feature ChargePoint Express Plus fast charging stations, which can deliver up to 500 kW to a single port, can fast-charge two vehicles at the same time, and are compatible with all EVs. The stations feature a proprietary cooling system to deliver peak charging speeds for sustained periods, ensuring that charging speed remains consistent.
The stations operate on the new ChargePoint Platform, which enables operators to monitor performance, adjust pricing, troubleshoot issues, and gain real-time insights to keep chargers running smoothly.
Rick Wilmer, CEO at ChargePoint, said, “This initiative will rapidly infill the ‘fast charging deserts’ across the Detroit area, allowing drivers to quickly recharge their vehicles when and where they need to.”
Read more: ChargePoint just gave its EV charging software a major AI upgrade
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Mercedes-Benz High-Power Charging and Starbucks have officially opened their first DC fast charging hub together, off the I-5 in Red Bluff, California.
The 400 kW Mercedes-Benz chargers are capable of adding up to 300 miles in 10 minutes, depending on the EV, and every stall has both NACS and CCS cables – they’re fully open DC fast chargers.
Mercedes-Benz HPC North America, a joint venture between subsidiaries of Mercedes-Benz Group and renewable energy producer MN8 Energy, first announced in July 2024 that it would install DC fast chargers at Starbucks stores along Interstate 5, the main 1,400-mile north-south interstate highway on the US West Coast from Canada to Mexico. Ultimately, Mercedes plans to install fast chargers at 100 Starbucks stores across the US.
Mercedes-Benz HPC opened its first North American charging site at Mercedes-Benz USA’s headquarters in Sandy Springs, Georgia, in November 2023 as part of an initial $1 billion charging network investment. As of the end of 2024, Mercedes had deployed over 150 operational fast chargers in the US, but it hasn’t disclosed an official number of how many chargers are currently online.
Andrew Cornelia, CEO of Mercedes-Benz HPC North America, is leaving the company at the end of the month to become global head of electrification & sustainability at Uber.
Read more: Mercedes-Benz is deploying 400 kW US-made EV fast chargers with CCS and NACS cables
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The race for autonomous driving has three fronts: software, hardware, and regulatory. For years, we’ve watched Tesla try to brute-force its way to “Full Self-Driving (FSD)” with its own custom hardware, while the rest of the automotive industry is increasingly lining up behind NVIDIA.
Now that we know Tesla’s new AI5 chip is delayed and won’t be in vehicles until 2027, it’s worth comparing the two most dominant “self-driving” chips today: Tesla’s latest Hardware 4 (AI4) and NVIDIA’s Drive Thor.
Here’s a table comparing the two chips with the best possible specs I could find. greentheonly’s teardown was particularly useful. If you find things you think are not accurate, please don’t hesitate to reach out:
| Feature / Specification | Tesla AI4 (Hardware 4.0) | NVIDIA Drive Thor (AGX / Jetson) |
|---|---|---|
| Developer / Architect | Tesla (in-house) | NVIDIA |
| Manufacturing Process | Samsung 7nm (7LPP class) | TSMC 4N (custom 5nm class) |
| Release Status | In production (shipping since 2023) | In production since 2025 |
| CPU Architecture | ARM Cortex-A72 (legacy) | ARM Neoverse V3AE (server-grade) |
| CPU Core Count | 20 cores (5× clusters of 4 cores) | 14 cores (Jetson T5000 configuration) |
| AI Performance (INT8) | ~100–150 TOPS (dual-SoC system) | 1,000 TOPS (per chip) |
| AI Performance (FP4) | Not supported / not disclosed | 2,000 TFLOPS (per chip) |
| Neural Processing Unit | 3× custom NPU cores per SoC | Blackwell Tensor Cores + Transformer Engine |
| Memory Type | GDDR6 | LPDDR5X |
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | ~384 GB/s | ~273 GB/s |
| Memory Capacity | ~16 GB typical system | Up to 128 GB (Jetson Thor) |
| Power Consumption | Est. 80–100 W (system) | 40 W – 130 W (configurable) |
| Camera Support | 5 MP proprietary Tesla cameras | Scalable, supports 8MP+ and GMSL3 |
| Special Features | Dual-SoC redundancy on one board | Native Transformer Engine, NVLink-C2C |
The most striking difference right off the bat is the manufacturing process. NVIDIA is throwing everything at Drive Thor, using TSMC’s cutting-edge 4N process (a custom 5nm-class node). This allows them to pack in the new Blackwell architecture, which is essentially the same tech powering the world’s most advanced AI data centers.
Tesla, on the other hand, pulled a move that might surprise spec-sheet warriors. Teardowns confirm that AI4 is built on Samsung’s 7nm process. This is mature, reliable, and much cheaper than TSMC’s bleeding-edge nodes.
When you look at the compute power, NVIDIA claims a staggering 2,000 TFLOPS for Thor. But there’s a catch. That number uses FP4 (4-bit floating point) precision, a new format designed specifically for the Transformer models used in generative AI.
Tesla’s AI4 is estimated to hit around 100-150 TOPS (INT8) across its dual-SoC redundant system. On paper, it looks like a slaughter, but Tesla made a very specific engineering trade-off that tells us exactly what was bottling up their software: memory bandwidth.
Tesla switched from LPDDR4 in HW3 to GDDR6 in HW4, the same power-hungry memory you find in gaming graphics cards (GPUs). This gives AI4 a massive memory bandwidth of approximately 384 GB/s, compared to Thor’s 273 GB/s (on the single-chip Jetson config) using LPDDR5X.
This suggests Tesla’s vision-only approach, which ingests massive amounts of raw video from high-res cameras, was starving for data.
Based on Elon Musk’s comments that Tesla’s AI5 chip will have 5x the memory bandwidth, it sounds like it might still be Tesla’s bottleneck.
Here is where Tesla’s cost-cutting really shows. AI4 is still running on ARM Cortex-A72 cores, an architecture that is nearly a decade old. They bumped the core count to 20, but it’s still old tech.
NVIDIA Thor, meanwhile, uses the ARM Neoverse V3AE, a server-grade CPU explicitly designed for the modern software-defined vehicle. This allows Thor to run not just the autonomous driving stack, but the entire infotainment system, dashboard, and potentially even an in-car AI assistant, all on one chip.
Thor has found many takers, especially among Tesla EV competitors such as BYD, Zeekr, Lucid, Xiaomi, and many more.
Electrek’s Take
There’s one thing that is not in there: price. I would assume that Tesla wins on that front, and that’s a big part of the project. Tesla developed a chip that didn’t exist, and that it needed.
It was an impressive feat, but it doesn’t make Tesla an incredible leader in silicon for self-driving.
Tesla is maxing out AI4. It now uses both chips, making it less likely to achieve the redundancy levels you need to deliver level 4-5 autonomy.
Meanwhile, we don’t have a solution for HW3 yet and AI5 is apparently not coming to save the day until 2027.
By then, there will likely be millions of vehicles on the road with NVIDIA Thor processors.
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