Governance Misalignment and the Deployment of Hydrogen as a Marine Fuel

Hydrogen appears in almost every maritime decarbonization roadmap, yet it barely sails: 19 vessels against more than 1600 powered by liquefied natural gas. This study combines an analysis of the global alternative-fueled fleet and orderbook (3094 fuel-vessel records) with an assessment of 26 international and European governance units, two of which are documented absences of an instrument, grouped into the seven conditions a hydrogen vessel needs to be built, certified, crewed, insured, financed and refueled. None of the 26 fully covers the condition it addresses, and the deficits run across all seven domains. Nor does binding demand regulation reach hydrogen where it is currently viable: the tonnage threshold it applies makes eligible nine out of ten LNG or methanol vessels and only two out of ten hydrogen vessels, a difference that narrows but does not close once adjusted for vessel segment. We term this pattern governance misalignment: conditions that must be met simultaneously but advance at different speeds, with unequal legal force, with ambiguous signals, and across fleet segments that do not coincide. The obstacle is not the absence of regulation but its lack of synchronization, a diagnosis replicable for any fuel whose deployment depends on several regulatory domains.