Maersk retrofits 200 ships

Maersk is not rebuilding its fleet from scratch. It is doing something less glamorous and, right now, more revealing. The company is working with about 50 shipowners to retrofit roughly 200 vessels in its time-chartered fleet, with the goal of burning less fuel, carrying cargo more efficiently, and cutting both costs and greenhouse-gas emissions. More than 1,500 individual retrofit projects have already been completed, and another 1,000 are scheduled to be finished by 2027. That scale matters because these are not all Maersk-owned ships. They are chartered vessels, which make up a large share of Maersk’s operations and fuel use. In container shipping, that creates a familiar problem. The carrier pays for fuel and lives with the operating economics, but the ship itself belongs to someone else. Maersk’s answer is to split the investment cost with the owners, so the line gets lower fuel bills and the owners get a more competitive asset at the end of the charter. The work itself is mostly about squeezing waste out of steel. Maersk says the retrofits are aimed at fuel efficiency and cargo-carrying capacity, which usually means the unromantic hardware of shipping decarbonization: propeller upgrades, pre-swirl devices that straighten water flow into the propeller, and redesigned bulbous bows that better match how ships actually sail today rather than how they were expected to sail years ago. These are not moonshot technologies. They are hydrodynamic tune-ups. That is exactly the point. Shipping has spent years talking about methanol, ammonia, and other future fuels. Maersk has leaned into that future harder than most carriers. It added ten dual-fuel methanol vessels in 2025 and expects six more in 2026. It also converted the Maersk Halifax into a dual-fuel methanol ship, a complex retrofit that took 88 days in a Chinese yard. But cleaner fuels are still scarce and expensive, and they do nothing for a vessel that wastes energy pushing the wrong shape through the water. Efficiency upgrades attack the problem now, on ships already in service. They also fit the regulatory mood. The shipping industry now operates under carbon-intensity rules that reward lower fuel burn and punish inefficient tonnage over time. Maersk has said it wants to cut its absolute scope 1 greenhouse-gas emissions by 35 percent by 2030 from a 2022 baseline, on the way to net zero by 2040. Fuel switching is necessary for that. It is not sufficient. A ship that needs less energy is easier to decarbonize no matter what ends up in the tank. There is also a colder commercial logic underneath the climate language. Maersk said the programme is meant to reduce “slot cost,” the cost of moving one container slot through the network. That is the number carriers obsess over when freight markets soften. Maersk’s own 2026 outlook points to continued overcapacity in container shipping, which means too many ships chasing too little pricing power. In that kind of market, a few percentage points of fuel savings stop being a nice engineering win and start looking like margin defense. That is why this story is bigger than one retrofit programme. It shows where shipping is actually finding progress in the 2020s. Not in a sudden leap to perfect green fuels. Not in a wholesale fleet replacement. In hundreds of small interventions, spread across charter contracts and drydock schedules, each one shaving a little drag, a little fuel, a little cost. Maersk says it has already carried out fuel-saving initiatives on 230 of its own vessels and, for the first time, on 150 time-chartered vessels. The new programme pushes that logic across about 200 chartered ships, one propeller and one bow at a time.