Momentum around ammonia as a marine fuel has often stalled at the same point: scale. While producers, shipowners, and regulators broadly agree on ammonia’s long-term potential, aligning supply, demand, and infrastructure has proven difficult.
But the roadblocks preventing progress seem to be pushing through. A recent Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between CF Industries, Trafigura, and TFG Marine signals a meaningful step toward breaking that logjam.
At its core, the agreement is about connectivity. It links large-scale production with trading, logistics, and bunkering to bridge the gap between low-carbon ammonia at the plant and actual fulfillment at the dock.
The MoU establishes a framework for collaboration across several areas:
Market Development
Stakeholder Engagement
Bunkering Logistics
Initial geographic regions focus on the US Gulf Coast and Northwest Europe. That regional pairing is no accident. Together, they connect the world’s largest ammonia production hub in Louisiana with Europe’s most advanced market for low-carbon shipping fuels.
For an industry still wrestling with first-mover risk, concentrating early efforts in regions with existing scale, infrastructure, and regulatory momentum is a practical method to accelerate adoption.
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The backbone of the partnership is CF Industries’ Donaldsonville complex, the largest ammonia facility in the world. The site has recently been modernized through a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project that came online in 2025.
In partnership with ExxonMobil, the facility can now sequester up to 2 million metric tons of CO₂ per year. And it turns conventional “gray” ammonia into low-carbon “blue” ammonia.
This distinction is important because blue ammonia can meet the maritime sector’s near-term emissions reduction requirements while greener pathways continue to scale. In short, it provides a connecting route to broader decarbonization objectives.
Ammonia’s adoption as a marine fuel has long been constrained by a chicken-and-egg problem. Shipowners are hesitant to order ammonia-powered vessels without confidence in fuel availability and bunkering infrastructure. Meanwhile, producers and infrastructure providers are reluctant to invest without firm demand from the shipping sector.
This mutual dependency has slowed progress despite broad agreement on ammonia’s decarbonization potential. Partnerships that align production, logistics, and bunkering help break this cycle by reducing risk on both sides.
This development helps to solve these logistical challenges the market faces:
For shipowners evaluating ammonia-powered vessels, coordinated infrastructure planning like this reduces uncertainty. Knowing that bunkering logistics, safety standards, and fuel availability are being developed in parallel makes investment decisions far more tangible.
This MoU doesn’t claim to solve every challenge facing ammonia as a marine fuel. But it does something arguably more important. It aligns credible players across the value chain around a shared, near-term execution plan.
By linking production scale, carbon management, trading expertise, and bunkering infrastructure, the partnership moves ammonia closer to commercial reality. The starting point is right where scale already exists and is expanding outward.
In a sector where progress depends as much on coordination as on technology, that alignment may prove just as important as the fuel itself.
To better understand how these value chains operate, and where value is created along the way, download our free eBook, From Feedstocks to Fuel. In it, we break down which technologies, markets, and decision points shaping low-carbon fuels today within both the marine and aviation sectors.