Transport, the link.
Northbound shipping of green ammonia and methanol, origin to destination. Origin-agnostic: the freight and boil-off logic holds for any A-to-B pairing. A transport-only operator can build a fleet around this node alone.
One leg of the chain, fully detachable.
This node moves a finished molecule from where it is produced to where it is received. It takes tonnes at one port and delivers tonnes at another, and its entire economics reduce to freight rate, distance, and the small physical loss of ammonia to boil-off in transit. Nothing about it depends on how the fuel was made or what it is used for downstream.
That independence is the point. A charterer who wants only the shipping leg can take this node and build a fleet or charter line around it, connecting their own production at one end to their own terminal at the other. The reference case here is Dakhla to Rotterdam, four days direct across the Atlantic with no chokepoint exposure, but the node's logic does not change when the origin or destination changes. Only the distance and the freight rate move.
What drives the node.
| Parameter | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Ammonia volumeM | 150,000 t/yr | Dakhla production output (Sim 1) |
| Methanol volumeM | 500,000 t/yr | Dakhla production output (Sim 1) |
| Ammonia freight rateP | $52.75 /t | VLGC Houston-Morocco Atlantic route, Platts Jan 2025 |
| Methanol freight rateE | $35.00 /t | Chemical tanker, Atlantic short-haul screening estimate |
| Transit timeM | 4 days | Dakhla → Rotterdam, direct Atlantic routing |
| Ammonia boil-off rateP | 0.024 %/day | Liquid ammonia sea BOG rate, comparative transport study |
| Methanol boil-off rateP | 0.005 %/day | Negligible, ambient storage, excluded from the model |
What the node produces.
| Cost line | Rate | Volume | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ammonia freight | $52.75/t | 150,000 t | $7.91M |
| Methanol freight | $35.00/t | 500,000 t | $17.50M |
| Total freight OPEX | 650,000 t | $25.41M |
A dedicated ship would be oversized.
The natural assumption for a node like this is a dedicated vessel. The figures say otherwise at this volume. A Very Large Ammonia Carrier holds roughly 63,000 tonnes per voyage, so Dakhla's 150,000 t/yr of ammonia needs about two and a half voyages a year, against a vessel that can run thirty. The ship would sit idle most of the year.
At Dakhla's volume, contracted freight is the base case, not an owned fleet. A $125M VLAC newbuild annualises to roughly $10.9M/yr, against $7.9M/yr to contract the same ammonia movement, contracting is both cheaper and avoids stranding an asset. An owned vessel only makes sense at much higher throughput, or for an operator consolidating several corridors onto one fleet. That consolidation play is precisely what a transport-only developer taking this node might build.
Where the numbers come from.
Ammonia freight ($52.75/t): VLGC freight assessment, Houston to Morocco, a comparable Atlantic-basin distance to Dakhla-Rotterdam. Platts / S&P Global, January 2025. Used as a project-grade proxy pending a route-specific charter quote.
Methanol freight ($35/t): screening estimate for a standard chemical tanker on an Atlantic short-haul. Methanol moves on a larger, more liquid vessel market than ammonia, so the rate is lower and the figure is held as an estimate pending quotation.
Ammonia boil-off (0.024%/day): daily sea-transport boil-off gas rate for liquid ammonia, from a comparative LNG / ammonia / methanol energy-transport study. Over a four-day transit this is 0.096% of cargo, a real but small loss.
Vessel benchmark ($125M, 93,000 m³ VLAC): Very Large Ammonia Carrier newbuild reference. Cargo tonnage derived at 0.68 t/m³ liquid ammonia density.
All figures are screening-stage and modelled, not quotes. They trace directly to the Corridor Module (Sim 4); changing the volumes or rates there reproduces every number on this page.
How this node stands alone.
The node connects through a single interface: tonnes of a molecule in at port A, tonnes out at port B. Anyone holding the adjacent nodes can plug into it without knowing anything else about the chain.