On Monday, 8 June, Massimo Perotti walked into Venice Climate Week and handed the European Union a problem it has been avoiding. Sanlorenzo's Executive Chairman delivered an open letter — the "Venice Call for Maritime Action" — to Jessika Roswall, the EU Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy, with a copy to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The message was blunt. Builders have done their part. Now Brussels has to do its.
"The technology is ready," Perotti said. "The challenge now is to ensure that infrastructure and fuel availability develop in parallel, so that these innovations can be fully realised."
A shipyard lobbying the European Commission directly is not something the industry sees often. That rarity is the story.
The ask
The Call lays out three demands, and none of them is about inventing anything new. First, speed up the supply of green methanol and the electrification of berths across the main maritime hubs of Europe and the Mediterranean. Second, line up institutional timelines with the pace the industry is already moving at, instead of leaving finished green yachts without fuel to run on. Third, hold everyone to measurable commitments, so decarbonisation stays honest and greenwashing has nowhere to hide.
The framing is the whole point. For years the public conversation has treated clean propulsion as a technology problem — the engines, the fuel cells, the batteries that don't exist yet. Sanlorenzo is arguing the opposite. The hardware exists. What's missing is a dock that can fuel it.
One per cent
Less than one per cent of the world's methanol is renewable. And what little there is sits almost entirely at two northern ports — Rotterdam and Antwerp-Bruges. For a yacht built around a methanol fuel cell and cruising the Mediterranean, that supply might as well be on another planet.
This is the gap the letter is pointing at. A builder can deliver a vessel that runs on green methanol; it cannot build the bunkering network that puts the fuel in the tank. That part is policy, ports and money — and it moves on a political clock, not an industrial one.
Hardware behind the words
What gives the Call its weight is that Sanlorenzo is not asking others to take a risk it hasn't taken itself. In 2024 the yard delivered the 50Steel, the first superyacht in the world running a methanol reformer fuel cell — a bi-fuel system that turns green methanol into clean energy onboard. Its sport arm, Bluegame, built the BGH-HSV: a 10-metre hydrogen-powered foiling multihull that hit close to 50 knots as a support vessel for the last America's Cup.
The yard has also set itself a carbon-neutrality target of 2040 — a full decade ahead of the EU's own 2050 deadline. The letter, in other words, comes from a builder that has already spent the capital and shipped the boats.
The argument is simple and uncomfortable: clean yachts already exist, and without the fuel to run them, they have no reason to. The bottleneck has moved from the engine room to the energy grid.
Not just Sanlorenzo
The Call is co-signed by a cross-section of the industry that gives it reach well beyond one shipyard. Robert van Tol, Executive Director of SYBAss, the body that represents the world's largest superyacht builders, put his name to it. So did Professor Flavio Manenti of the Politecnico di Milano on the academic side; Gregorio Passani, Chief Business Officer of engine-maker Nanni; Alessandro Airoldi, CEO of Ranieri Tonissi; and Leah Werner, Director of the Water Revolution Foundation.
That spread — builder, trade body, university, two propulsion suppliers and an environmental NGO — is what turns a single company's open letter into something Brussels has to read as an industry position. Whether the European Commission answers it is the next question. The technology, as Perotti keeps saying, is no longer the one in doubt.
Photo: Sanlorenzo / Barche Magazine.
