Sustainable Ships' FuelEu Pool Tool

Core Features

The FuelEU Pool Tool offers decision-support for users to model different fleet configurations and test how operational and commercial assumptions affect FuelEU costs.

• Fleet Pooling Analysis: Users can compare pooling strategies for up to 10 ships in the downloadable Excel tool, combining vessels with compliance surpluses and deficits. Sustainable Ships says the spreadsheet can be adjusted to accommodate as many as 1,000 ships.

• Fuel and Blending Scenarios: Users can select FuelEU Maritime fuels, blend different fuel quantities and modify fuel properties, including for specific biofuel blends not represented by standard regulatory values.

• FuelEU Cost Modelling: The tool calculates the cost implications of FuelEU compliance and pooling, including FuelEU penalties, allowing pooled and individual compliance strategies to be compared. The newer model also considers potential credit revenues.

• EU ETS and Fuel Costs: Users can compare fuel costs, EU ETS costs and FuelEU penalties together. The downloadable version also permits adjustments to EU ETS emission factors and other assumptions.

• Compliance Strategy Comparison: The current tool can compare up to three scenarios, while Sustainable Ships' 2026 analysis specifically demonstrates comparisons between paying FuelEU penalties, buying pooling credits and using biofuel blends.

• Long-Term Scenario Analysis: Users can model FuelEU costs and strategies through 2050, changing fleet composition, fuels and blending assumptions as FuelEU's GHG-intensity requirements become progressively stricter.

Closing Insights

Sustainable Ships introduced the FuelEU Pool Tool in August 2024, ahead of FuelEU Maritime taking effect on 1 January 2025. Its specialization is useful because pooling is not simply a matter of adding vessels together: a valid FuelEU pool must maintain a positive total compliance balance and comply with rules governing how surpluses and deficits are allocated.

Sustainable Ships continues to develop the tool around practical compliance decisions. An April 2026 update expanded its use for comparing three strategies—paying the penalty, obtaining surplus through third-party pooling and blending biofuels—and for testing how changing fuel and compliance-credit prices affect the economics. The company also publishes case studies using the tool, including an analysis showing how the compliance surplus of a fully electric chemical tanker could be pooled with conventionally fuelled vessels.

The downloadable Excel version costs €49 and allows calculations to be saved, customized and used offline; Sustainable Ships members can download its Excel tools as part of their membership.