Note: This article originally appeared in Biofuel International's 2026 Outlook Report

By Jakob Bejbro Andersen, MASH Makes CEO

Maritime decarbonisation has hit delays at the global policy level, most recently with the postponement of the IMO’s Net-Zero Framework. But the transition hasn’t stopped. It’s shifting to regional regulation and commercial realities. FuelEU Maritime is now in force, and that changes the game for shipowners.

In other words, while industry is not done debating long-term solutions on the global scale, Fuel EU Maritime is now an operational and commercial reality. This makes biofuels an important tool for the next phase of the transition. Under this, ships operating in Europe will have to meet tightening greenhouse gas intensity targets by switching fuels, buying compliance units from others, or paying penalties. This make slower-emission options more attractive, and inaction will become more costly.

In the year ahead, many shipowners will move from abstract decarbonisation strategies to practical questions:

What can be done to decarbonise the existing fleet, which will not be able to change to adapt to new fuels?

On which routes is alternative fuel availability already realistic?

Where does it make commercial sense to start reducing fuel intensity now, rather than paying for it later?

E-fuels like e-ammonia and e-methanol are likely to play a role in the long-term fuel mix. But they remain constrained by high production costs, limited infrastructure, and slow supply chain development.

Today’s biofuels (such as FAME) already work at scale, but they are inshort supply and increasingly pulled into competing uses across road transport,aviation, and industry.

By contrast, advanced next-gen biofuels, especially those derived fromagricultural residues and delivering carbon removal benefits, are among the fewoptions that can scale and expand the sustainable feedstock base, rather thanjust reshuffle existing volumes.

Given these hurdles, this is the moment where biofuels, especially credible drop-in blends like what we make at MASH Makes, stop being a signaling exercise and start becoming a real planning tool.

Shipping is not alone in the race for feedstocks

Maritime is not making these decisions alone. In aviation, the push for sustainable aviation fuels is accelerating faster than supply can follow. In road transport, biofuels remain a mature but politically sensitive market, where policy shifts can move volumes and prices quickly.

That means that the coming year will also bring tougher scrutiny of:

• Feedstock origin
• Indirect land-use risks like, deforestation, food vs fuel, etc.
• Chain-of-custody systems tracking biofuels from origin to end    use
• Lifecycle emissions accounting

In practice, this will separate fuels that can be used at scale under regulatory scrutiny from those that remain stuck in pilot projects. For the shipping industry, that means steering clear of the worst competition by focusing on lower grade fuels that can only be used in ship engines.

Sustainability will stop being a side question

As competition for sustainable feedstocks increases, there will be closer attention on where fuels come from, what they displace, and how their climate impact is documented.

At MASH Makes, our pathway is based on agricultural residues and a pyrolysis process that produces both biofuel and biochar. For every tonne of biofuel we produce, we also generate biochar that is applied to soil as a stable carbon sink and soil amendment. This creates a direct link between fuel production and carbon removal, and an independent assessment has confirmed that our overall production pathway is carbon negative.

We also apply a new metric to track how much additional crop residue is generated in response to biochar use, relative to the biomass originally used to produce it. Unlike static sustainability metrics, this calculation reflects the system’s regenerative capacity. This ties soil improvement directly to biomass resource availability, which is critical for scaling sustainable fuel production.

“Drop-in” must have meaning

Tolerance for technical uncertainty will drop as biofuels become a serious part of compliance strategies. A fuel that is supposed to reduce risk cannot introduce new operational risk.

That’s why at MASH Makes, we focus on a simple principle: the shipping industry needs fuels that behave predictably in real engines under real operating conditions.

In the past year, we saw an important shift in that direction.

Together with DS NORDEN, we completed the world’s first commercial vessel trial using a biofuel produced from acarbon-negative process. The vessel sailed roundtrip from Singapore to Brazil using a blend containing our biofuel in its auxiliary engine. This biofuel was derived from cellulose and lignin-based pyrolysis oil. That’s a significant step beyond biofuels from cooking oil or oilseeds like UCOME and HVO, which are limited in scale and feedstock availability.

The result was deliberately uneventful: no injector issues, no clogging, no abnormal behaviour. From an operator’s point of view, it behaved like a normal marine fuel. And that is exactly what “drop-in” must mean if biofuels are to move from niche compliance tools to mainstream fleet solutions.

In parallel, we also cleared an important technical milestone with one of the most challenging bio-based fuels in shipping: cashew nut shell liquid (CNSL).

CNSL has long been seen as both promising and frustrating. It is non-food-based, but it also tends to polymerise and behave more like a resin than a fuel. That is not surprising, given that it is traditionally used in paints and coatings. Earlier attempts to use CNSL in marine engines proved unreliable.

Through our upgrading process, we turned CNSL into a stable fuel component for marine use. In a recent marine-grade engine test, a blend containing upgraded CNSL showed clean combustion, no injector fouling, no residue, and stable operation across all loads, with no tuning or pressure adjustments required. Emissions stayed within expected limits.

For shipping, what matters is not how novel a fuel is, but whether it can be used reliably at scale—and that means investing in scalable, non-fatty-acid pathways like cellulose and lignin-derived bio-oils.

The end of waiting for perfect fuels

The coming year will be the one where more operators accept that the transition will be incremental. Biofuels are one of the few tools that can reduce emissions with the fleet we already have, while the next generation of vessels and fuels is being built.

Jakob Bejbro Andersen is CEO of MASH Makes, where he leads the company’s work on scaling biochar-based carbon removal and advanced biofuels for shipping and industry.

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