Methanol Blue

Commissioned by Busan Sea Arts Festival 2023

This research film by Liquid Time (Jacob Bolton and Miriam Matthiessen) remotely follows the course of one cargo ship sailing from Rotterdam to Singapore, down one of the world’s largest proposed green corridors. Through a series of conversations held over the course of the 30-day voyage, this work examines the production of the image of the shipping industry’s green future, looking at the legal, economic and infrastructural basis for a green transition that, although promised, remains a distant prospect.

The entire world’s economy rests on the shipping industry. The majority of things that countries produce or use every day – consumer goods, wheat, rice, oil, wood, coal – are moved around the world on cargo ships that grow more and more massive every year.

Most of these ships are powered by heavy fuel oil (HFO), a dirty fuel formed from the residual (and therefore cheaper) product left over from petroleum refining. All this HFO leaves its traces across oceans and waterways across the world.

One response to this within the maritime sector is to build ‘greener’ ships that run on ‘greener’ fuels. Over the coming years, Busan’s shipyards will be hard at work building a new fleet of ‘green’ ships that run on alternative fuels such as methanol and hydrogen. Once built, many of these ships will run across what are called ‘green corridors’, bilateral agreements formed between two ports around the world, to plan for the green transition in shipping, secure the supply of ‘green’ fuels and the new infrastructure for refuelling ships.

Peeling back the layers of regulation and economic planning that constitute the green corridor, Liquid Time show how the industry response to the climate crisis is not one based on radically altering current markets away from destructive tendencies, but generating new markets within which the same business-as-usual processes that drive the world economy can play out.

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Jacob Bolton

projects writing bio ⓘ email substack (Liquid Time)

projects
writing
bio ⓘ

email
substack (Liquid Time)