NORDEN has acquired a minority stake in MASH Makes, a Danish-Indian biofuel scale-up, which researches, develops and produces renewable fuels from biomass waste.
The investment is a strategic partnership, where NORDEN secures access to renewable fuels, specifically biooil, at favourable pricing. The partnership places NORDEN at the forefront of the research and development of future renewable fuels, where NORDEN can also benefit from future renewable biooils once developed.
NORDEN and MASH Makes have prior to the investment collaborated on the use of biofuels since 2021. Based on this collaboration and subsequent in-depth review of the MASH Makes technical platform and business model, NORDEN gained insights into the viability and scalability of the MASH Makes biofuel platform.
“We cannot rely solely on traditional offtake agreements with fuel suppliers to achieve decarbonisation at the necessary speed that climate change requires,” says NORDEN CEO, Jan Rindbo. “We need to be a greater part of the supply chain, to both ensure significant volumes and attractive prices that can make NORDEN competitive in offering low emission freight solutions to our customers.”
Decarbonising customers’ supply chains
The investment is in line with NORDEN’s climate strategy of helping our customers decarbonise their supply chain and is also a natural next step in our biofuel journey. NORDEN was in 2018 one of the first shipping companies to successfully trial 100% biofuel on a large ocean-going vessel.
“With this investment, we are turning our attention to the next generation of biofuels and scale up consumption of biofuel,” says Adam Nielsen, Head of Logistics & Climate Solutions at NORDEN. “The benefit of biooil is that it can be used in existing vessel technologies and bridge the gap between transitioning from fossil fuels to carbon free fuels, which requires new vessel technologies.”
First trial in 2024
As a strategic partner, NORDEN’s role will be to help MASH Makes bring its biooil products to the marine fuel market and offtake biofuel for NORDEN’s fleet. The production of MASH Makes’ first biooil product is in a late development stage and we expect to conduct the first trial onboard NORDEN vessels in early 2024. Furthermore, the expectation is that MASH Makes can gradually ramp up its production and become a significant supplier to NORDEN’s fleet within the next 3 years in strategically important locations for decarbonising global tramp shipping.
“We are excited and humbled by the fact that NORDEN – a uniquely capable purchaser in the biofuel space – has seen sufficient potential in our platform to not only invest, but also to enter a strategic offtake- and potential production site financing agreements with MASH. We believe that this partnership will greatly accelerate the continued scale up of our business and put us on track for our gigaton range greenhouse gas reduction target,” says Jakob Andersen, CEO of MASH Makes.