Why Carriers Perform Differently on Identical Trade Lanes

Global container shipping emissions intensity rose 1.5% year over year in Q2 2026, but the increase masks efficiency improvements across almost every vessel-size segment, according to Decoding Maritime Emissions Q2 2026: Efficiency Hidden in the Details from VesselBot.

Fleet-wide and trade-lane averages most shippers and regulators currently rely on can obscure significant differences in the emissions performance of individual voyages and comparable services.

On the Northern Europe to North America East Coast trade, for example, three carriers operating comparable services on the same trade lane recorded materially different emissions outcomes despite similar voyage distances and port pairs, highlighting the role of vessel deployment, utilization and voyage execution in determining emissions intensity.

“A trade lane average tells a shipper what a route looks like on paper. It does not tell them what happened on their shipment. On the Northern Europe to North America East Coast trade lane, we observed a 31.3% efficiency gap between the most and least efficient carrier for the route, despite similar voyage distances and port pairs. Distance alone cannot explain that spread. The difference is in how those voyages were executed,” says Constantine Komodromos, CEO and founder of VesselBot. “The same pattern appears at fleet level. A fleet-wide number moving 1.5% in the wrong direction suggests the industry lost ground this quarter. But five of the six vessel-size segments actually became more efficient. Feeders moved in the opposite direction and, because they accounted for nearly two-thirds of all voyages, were enough to pull the aggregate number higher. That is the risk of managing to an average: it can point you in the opposite direction of what is actually happening.”

Key takeaways:

·       The fleet-wide average worsened. Almost every vessel-size segment did not. Overall well-to-wake intensity rose 1.5% year-over-year to 231.7 g CO2e per TEU km. But five of the six vessel-size categories tracked in the report improved over the same period, from a 0.9% gain for Panamax vessels up to a 10.6% gain for the largest ships (VLCS). Only Feeders, which carried out 63.9% of all Q2 voyages, got less efficient, and that one segment's decline was enough to pull the fleet-wide number in the wrong direction.

·       NeoPanamax and very large container ships ran just 7.4% of all voyages in Q2 2026, yet generated 43.5% of total transport work while accounting for only 27.4% of emissions. Feeder and Panamax vessels showed the inverse pattern, running 80% of voyages, generating only 26% of transport work, and producing 45.6% of emissions.

·       The four major fronthaul trades, China/East Asia to Northern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the North America West Coast, plus Northern Europe to the North America East Coast, accounted for just 1.2% of all Q2 voyages. Those same voyages generated 21.7% of total quarterly transport work while producing only 12.3% of total quarterly emissions.

·       Utilization emerged as one of the strongest drivers of voyage-level emissions intensity. Voyages in the most efficient emissions-intensity category averaged 80% utilization, compared to 31% for the least efficient. The most efficient voyages also carried close to 9,000 TEU on average.