A petition to close the FuelEU pooling loophole

BioJejak has submitted a petition to the European Parliament asking it to close the provision in FuelEU Maritime that lets a shipping company buy its way to compliance instead of reducing its own emissions. This briefing summarises the petition and the case behind it.

The problem in one paragraph

FuelEU Maritime (Regulation (EU) 2023/1805) sets a limit on the average greenhouse gas intensity of the energy a ship uses. Under Article 21 it then lets ships meet that limit by pooling their compliance balances, and it places no requirement that the ships belong to the same company. A company whose ships burn conventional fuel can join a pool with an unrelated company's over-complying ships, pay for their surplus, and be certified compliant without changing a single tonne of fuel. In the first compliance year more than 90% of ships met their obligation this way, and the traded price of compliance has fallen to roughly a seventh of the penalty. The provision meant to reward investment in cleaner fuel has become, in practice, a cheap way to avoid it.

Why this matters

Recital 57 of the Regulation states that pooling was created to avoid technology lock-in and to provide incentives for investment in advanced technologies. Open cross-company pooling does the opposite. It rewards operators who invest nothing, lets them buy cheap surplus from those who did, and removes the demand signal that was supposed to finance renewable and low-carbon marine fuel. The Regulation itself anticipates the risk: Article 30(2)(k) obliges the Commission to consider measures against attempts by companies to evade its requirements. Cross-company pooling at a collapsed price is exactly that.

What the petition asks

The petition asks the European Parliament to call on the Commission to amend the Regulation so that pooling is confined to a single organisation:

• Amend Article 21(1) so that compliance balances may be pooled only between ships of the same company, as defined in Article 3(13), or of companies under common control within the same group.
• Delete Article 21(3), which exists only to enable pools across two or more companies.
• Conform recital 57 so that pooling rewards investment across an operator's own fleet and cannot be used to buy compliance from unrelated operators.

The Commission's review of the Regulation, due by 31 December 2027 under Article 30(2), is the natural vehicle for the change.

What it deliberately keeps

The change is narrow. It removes only the purchase of compliance between unrelated companies. It preserves banking of a ship's own surplus, borrowing, and pooling within a single company or group, so a real operator can still balance its own fleet. It also keeps the FuelEU penalty as the backstop. A company that will not cut its own intensity and has no internal surplus would pay the penalty, which is the true polluter-pays price. Because the penalty is far above the traded pool price, closing the loophole is the single change most likely to return genuine demand for green marine fuel, which is the Regulation's own objective.

Status

The petition has been submitted to the European Parliament's Committee on Petitions, with a clause-by-clause legal analysis of the relevant provisions as supporting material. The full petition and analysis are available on request.

For the market evidence behind this briefing, see the related BioJejak briefings on the collapse in the FuelEU compliance price and on why the regulation will not need green methanol before 2040.