The Week in Alt Fuels: Demand before supply in International Shipping News 18/05/2026 Some shipowners are contracting green methanol supply that does not yet exist, potentially to avoid a future scramble for the fuel. Wallenius Wilhelmsen will begin receiving bio-methanol bunkers from Equinor at the ports of Zeebrugge and Antwerp later this year, with a two-year supply agreement already in place. The Norwegian vehicle carrier has at least 14 methanol dual-fuel vessels on order for delivery between 2026-2028. German carrier Hapag-Lloyd has signed an offtake with China’s Goldwind for 250,000 mt/year of green methanol, with deliveries expected to begin this year. Fuels exist. The ships are coming. The deals are live. But not all agreements signed this year look like this. In some cases, fuel supply is being secured years before either the vessels or production plants are operational. London-based RFOcean has signed a binding long-term offtake agreement with ETFuels to purchase e-methanol at a fixed price from 2030. The fuel will come from ETFuels’ Rattlesnake Gap project in West Texas, a planned 120,000 mt/year facility currently at the front-end engineering and design stage. RFOcean’s eight methanol-ready vessels on order will not run on methanol upon delivery, but they are designed to be retrofitted later. ETFuels has secured access to renewable power and biogenic CO2 for the plant, and confirmed incentives of around $1.5 billion under the US Inflation Reduction Act. With the offtake agreement in place, ETFuels said the project has moved into “financeable territory.” “This agreement converts that fleet optionality into secured, fixed-price compliant fuel supply before the market tightens,” ETFuels said. The producer added that the agreement was partly driven by FuelEU Maritime’s tightening greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity requirements from 2030, which are expected to increase demand for compliant fuels. “This isn’t just about compliance, it’s about competitive position