Maersk broker partners with McKinsey to drive maritime decarbonisation

Maersk Broker Advisory Services and McKinsey & Company have joined forces to assist shipowners and operators in defining their decarbonisation roadmap and strategy.

Based on market research from Maersk Broker Advisory Services and an AI-based solution from McKinsey’s QuantumBlack, which leverages technological and economic modelling of ship efficiency levers and alternative fuels, the collaboration aims to guide the industry to take future investment decisions on a well-informed basis backed by data to avoid stranded assets and unnecessary capital expenditures.

Maersk Broker Advisory Services, part of Maersk Broker K/S, and McKinsey & Company agreed to establish a partnership to develop and launch the Fleet Decarbonisation Optimizer tool to assist stakeholders in the maritime industry in developing their decarbonisation strategies. The partnership is built on proprietary research of both Maersk Broker Advisory Services and McKinsey & Company on the total cost of ownership and carbon abatement implications of ship efficiency levers and alternative fuels like e-ammonia, e-methanol, bio-methanol, bio-LNG, biodiesel, and others.

The shipping industry is recognised as a “hard-to-abate” sector, as the decarbonisation solutions of the industry carry a high abatement cost compared to current alternatives. This creates significant uncertainty, and all shipowners and operators will be confronted with difficult strategic decisions in the upcoming decade. The collaboration aims to help stakeholders in the maritime industry to make these decisions on the best possible information platform with expert guidance.

The aim of the collaboration between Maersk Broker Advisory Services and McKinsey & Company is knowledge sharing, mutual access to relevant data, and the development and launch of an AI-based optimisation model that provides a tailor-made roadmap for cost-effective decarbonisation of entire fleets. The model incorporates not just a large amount of key data from the maritime industry but also utilises data from other industries going through similar developments and challenges with respect to decarbonisation.

“We believe that the strategic partnership accelerates the process of successfully decarbonising the shipping industry. Maersk Broker Advisory Services and McKinsey & Company have an interest in using our resources to help the maritime industry in its decarbonisation journey, and we believe that our combined knowledge will permit our clients to take better and well-informed investment decisions. In Maersk Broker Advisory Services as well as the wider Maersk Broker organization we have technical, commercial, and financial expertise that can help the maritime industry to develop and execute its decarbonisation strategy,” said Jesper Bo Hansen, Managing Director of Maersk Broker Advisory Services.

“We couldn’t be more excited to launch this partnership with Maersk Broker Advisory Services to help shipping industry players find their most cost-optimal decarbonisation pathway. There is a lot of ‘noise’ in the public domain about different decarbonisation options, and our AI-based optimisation modelling will help shipowners and operators find the ‘signal’ amidst the ‘noise’ for their specific fleet and operating requirements,” said Matt Stone, Partner at McKinsey & Company.