Every time the decarbonisation rulebook slips, the industry breathes out. The relief is the costly part, because the pressures deciding which yards survive are already here, with or without it. By Ollie Taylor
Ask most people in our industry what will finally get it to lower its environmental impact, and you’ll get the answer I’d give you myself. Legislation. Marine is a low-margin, risk-averse business. Right now it’s a nervous one too. Boat sales have softened, the smaller end worst of all, and close to half of marina operators expect their market to weaken over the next year. In a market like that, a new material is a real risk on cost and on performance, the customer pull that would pay for it mostly isn’t quite here yet, and when British Marine last asked, appetite for cleaner fuels and electric was still very low. So it understandably gets treated as an optional extra, the spend you defer until the good times come back. The honest truth is that most of the industry won’t move until it’s made to.
So every time the rulebook slips, the way it did last October when the IMO shelved its net-zero vote for a year, you can almost hear the whole industry exhale, relieved it can wait a little longer. The relief is real, but it’s also short-lived. Legislation will come, because in an industry like ours it’s the only thing that eventually moves everyone, and every year it’s put off is a year the bill it brings gets bigger, not smaller.
We don’t have to guess how this ends, because another industry has already lived it. In the 1990s, with California’s clean-air rules bearing down, General Motors built a genuinely good electric car, the EV1, and leased about a thousand of them. Then the industry lobbied the rules down, and the moment the pressure was off, GM took the cars back from drivers who wanted to keep them and had them crushed. It had built the future, won itself the relief, and destroyed its own head start in the same breath.
The very year GM scrapped the EV1, a startup called Tesla was founded to build exactly what it had thrown away. It built a car people actually wanted by rethinking the whole thing: how it’s powered, how you buy and live with it, and above all the factory and supply chain behind it, building its own battery plants rather than waiting on suppliers it couldn’t control. It never asked anyone to buy one to save the planet, and in barely two decades it overtook carmakers that had spent a century in the business.
When GM cancelled the EV1 programme, it was valued at approximately $30bn; Tesla was a brand-new startup in 2003 but is today valued at $1.4tn. The company that controlled its own inputs and rebuilt the system from the ground up beat the giants who had a 90-year head start.
It’s already happening at the large commercial end of the water. While our industry waited for the rulebook, a Swedish steelmaker delivered the world’s first fossil-free steel to Volvo back in 2021, years before Europe started pricing carbon into imported steel via the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) this year. Steel is roughly four-fifths of a commercial ship. The supplier who saw it coming now sells the answer, and the yards that waited will buy it at the regulated price. The same clock is running on the fleet afloat. A tanker drawn up years ago with little thought for fuel now sells at a discount brokers put at 12 to 15 per cent. It trades far less often than a clean one, because a poor carbon rating quietly takes money off what a ship is worth and that’s all before the real legislation has taken effect!
And the rules are the least urgent of the pressures bearing down on you. While the industry waits to be told, the economics have already shifted. Materials and supply chains have become volatile in a way they weren’t ten years ago. Energy costs swing wildly, and an industry still building for top speed and thousand-mile range, in boats that sit at a pontoon most of their lives, is carrying cost it doesn’t need to. Insurance is getting dearer and, in places, harder to get at all as climate risk is priced in. None of it is waiting for legislation.
Yet the industry keeps filing all of this under sustainability, when in reality it belongs within your growth strategy; it’s inherently linked to understanding cost, supply and risk. It’s a commercial decision, and a business-critical one, long before it’s an environmental one. Controlling your own inputs is supply security. Build a boat you can take apart and reuse, and the next spike in material prices stops being your problem. The yards moving first aren’t being virtuous about it. They’re taking the volatility off their own balance sheet before a rule, a supplier or an insurer does it for them, and at a price of their choosing rather than one set for them. How you make money in this business is changing, and it’s happening with or without the rules.
The arguments about IMO timelines and who pays for them will carry on, and you can’t build a strategy on those. Build it on what’s actually coming at you. Your costs, your inputs, your energy, your exposure. The rule, when it finally arrives, won’t create the winners. It’ll only name them.
Ollie Taylor is co-founder of Marine Futures and leads the MarineShift360 Impact Accelerator, which helps the marine industry bring lifecycle thinking into how boats are designed and built.
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