Shipper green insetting financing Hapag-Lloyd retrofits

The willingness of Hapag-Lloyd’s shipper customers to participate in the biofuel insetting programme Ship Green is helping to provide financing for the company’s much-publicised retrofit drive, Fleet Manager Captain Silke Lehmkoester told Ship Repair Newsletter.

The option to scrap and renew the fleet now seems less attractive than retrofitting the existing one, incentivising Hapag-Lloyd to remodel ship bows, replace propellers, and, in one of the most talked-about retrofits of the year, converting five of its existing engines to methanol.

“This is a great turnaround… on the customer side,” Capt. Lehmkoester told Ship Repair Newsletter. “We are very happy to see that our customers book the [ship green] add-on more and more. If we had to pay for the complete biofuel, there would be less money in the pot. But by having more cash flow available, we have also cash flow to invest into retrofits, and this is like the payoff.

However, as retrofit interest grows, it is more difficult to find yard slots thanks to constrained capacity, Lehmkoester said. “Our vessels are there to transport cargo first, so we really have to make sure we don't take out the vessel at an inconvenient time - matching the retrofit with an in-water survey or drydocking. With the disruption in the past years, on-time delivery is sometimes not as easy as it used to be.”