VesselBot has released its latest quarterly analysis, Decoding Maritime Emissions Q1 2026: Efficiency Under Pressure, examining container shipping operations across 82,212 voyages completed by 6,187 container-carrying vessels during the first quarter of 2026.

The report provides a voyage-level analysis of emissions performance across vessel sizes, carriers, age groups, trade routes, and individual carriers, revealing why fleet-wide averages fail to reflect the operational reality of individual shipments. The findings give shippers and their logistics teams the operational visibility needed to make more informed operational decisions to optimize both transportation costs and emissions performance.

The analysis comes as container shipping faces mounting pressure from geopolitical disruption, tightening emissions regulation, and increasingly volatile trade flows.

Key findings from the report include:

• Fleet averages mask a significant difference in emissions intensity
Average Well-to-Wake emissions intensity across all Q1 2026 voyages reached 208.2 g CO₂e per TEU-km. Within that same quarter, only Feeder containerships exceeded the quarterly average intensity, by reaching 266 g CO₂e per TEU km, while all other container ships categories operated at substantially lower intensities. The difference is structural, driven by vessel size, cargo utilization, and distance traveled. Any logistics decision based on a fleet average is, by definition, built on a figure that no individual shipment will match.
• A small share of global fleet performs the majority of transport work.
NeoPanamax vessels and Very Large Container Ships accounted for only 6.6% of all voyages, yet generated 41.3% of total transport work during Q1 2026. By contrast, Feeder containerships carried out the majority of voyages (64.5%) while contributing only 27.7% of total transport work, reflecting the operational inefficiencies of high-frequency short-distance regional operations.
• Carrier performance differs significantly on the same trade lane.
Analysis across the four major fronthaul trades showed that emissions differences between carriers operating identical routes were driven primarily by vessel deployment choices, cargo utilization, and port-pair combinations rather than speed alone.
• Utilization remains the strongest operational driver of efficiency.
Average utilization declined consistently as emissions intensity increased, ranging from 77% for the most efficient voyages to 51% for the least efficient. The most efficient voyages also carried an average of 9,163 TEU, compared with the quarterly average of 2,597 TEU.

“Real-time execution-grade maritime emissions data at the carrier, vessel, and port-pair level gives logistics teams the visibility needed to evaluate operational performance and optimize transportation decisions based on how shipments actually move rather than on generalized industry averages,” said Constantine Komodromos, CEO and Founder of VesselBot. “As commercial and regulatory pressure intensifies, and geopolitical disruptions continue to reshape global supply chains, voyage-level intelligence is becoming essential not only for emissions reporting, but also for improving transportation efficiency, carrier selection, and supply chain resilience.”

Source: VesselBot