Maritime emissions compliance platform Zero44 has launched its new carbon insetting module, said to be the industry’s first software to bring regulatory compliance and carbon insetting decision-making into a single solution.
Carbon insetting lets operators sell the emission reductions from low-carbon fuel use directly to cargo owners who want to cut their own Scope 3 emissions. It is already common in the container and bulk segments. For operators, it is considered the only way to recover part of a low-carbon fuel investment from the specific customer who benefits from it, something FuelEU Maritime cannot do. The catch is additionality: reductions sold on the voluntary market must not also count toward FuelEU targets. Until now, operators have tracked this manually, using spreadsheets to keep volumes reserved for insetting separate from volumes used for compliance, across a fleet where prices and compliance balances change daily.
Zero44’s Carbon Insetting module removes that manual work. Built on the same Bunker Delivery Note and Proof of Sustainability data operators already use for compliance reporting, it shows the value of every fuel volume as FuelEU surplus compared with an insetting certificate, using live surplus and inset prices. Once an operator allocates a volume to insetting, Zero44 automatically deducts it from the vessel’s FuelEU compliance balance, so the surplus to be released rather than banked is always correct at reporting time. The underlying data can be pushed straight to the operator’s registry of choice, removing duplicate entry between systems.
Friederike Hesse, Co-Founder and MD, Zero44, said: “Every tonne of low-carbon fuel an operator buys is money that can come back through FuelEU surplus or through insetting, but rarely both at the same value. Our customers can now see, for every bunkering event, which route pays more today and act on it. That turns a cost they were already carrying into revenue they were leaving on the table.”
The module is already live with a global shipping operator, which manages its insetting programme with 123Carbon, an independent carbon insetting registry and a Zero44 integration partner.
Image: Zero44’s latest software combines regulatory compliance and carbon insetting (source: Zero44)
