RE: About MSC19 Jun 2022 15:48
Thanks for writing up your thoughts, DevonianExile. I hadn't realised that MSC Shipmanagement Cyprus offered services to third parties; that could be a very useful tool for future expansion.
I'd like to run with one theme brought up in your post, ("QFI offers just one of a variety of possible outcomes for transition fuels at MSC").
One of bioMSAR/MSAR's key abilities is that it can carry multiple different types of feedstock, whilst producing an output of the same quality. In my view, this makes it a different proposition to many competing offers, which are often tied to a small subset of all available feedstocks (which increases operational and logistical complexity enormously).
This could make bioMSAR an ideal 'carrier' platform for many different fuel types. They just need to support MSAR and they can effectively unlock a huge range of fuels and the associated unified supply chain. For example our pipeline of feedstocks under validation: glycerol, lignins, pyrolysis oils, methanol, ethanol, etc.
So, you don't need lots of duplication of skills, infrastructure, segmentation of your fleet's engines.
You can't normally mix together most of these fuels. So you would need separate storage for each one; this is just awful from a cost and logistics perspective. Instead, MSC could just let Quadrise and their bioMSAR technology hide all the differences; everyone just deals with MSAR.
As an analogy: if you turn on your gas cooker, you can't tell whether it was produced via fossil fuel extraction, biodigestion, hydrogen blend, etc. Everything comes down the same pipeline, and is 'fungible' for the purposes of utilising it as domestic gas. At a molecular level, there *is* a difference, but for the application it's designed for it is absolutely indistinguishable. It's the job of the operators to ensure the blends meet the specification required. We don't have 3 different gas pipelines and 3 different boilers for different types of gas.
That's like Quadrise with bioMSAR. They come up with ways of integrating new low-carbon fuel sources into bioMSAR, and producing a fuel that meets the specification (i.e. it "just works"). This unlocks a wider variety of feedstocks that otherwise might be unavailable, and massively reduces operational and logistical complexity.
Of course, this is AIM and the real world. Success is never guaranteed, and even brilliant solutions sometimes fail to achieve what they deserve for reasons unrelated to how good they are. Risk abounds, but I look forward very much to hearing the next steps for the MSC trials.
And I have more faith in MSC than Maersk, certainly.
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