Teekay Shuttle Tankers’ sale of “green bonds” that raised $125m towards four new low-emission vessels for the Norwegian North Sea was understandably hailed as a success by the company, despite some investor reluctance.

As chief financial officer Jan Rune Steinsland told my colleague Joe Brady last week: “We were completely pleased with the outcome.”

But try telling Greta Thunberg or supporters of ­Extinction Rebellion that finance for ships to carry crude oil could be called green. They would laugh in your face, ridiculing the concept as greenwash.

And they would have justification, since for all Teekay Shuttle’s evidence that the vessels are significantly cleaner than those they replace, they remain part of the polluting carbon energy chain that is a key driver of climate change.

It is a vivid example of the gulf that remains in the polarised debate over how fast society needs to adapt to decelerate the widely acknowledged risk of catastrophic climate change.

Teekay Shuttle’s senior unsecured green bonds were a landmark, as they were the first to be successfully sold by a Western shipowner, raising the finance at 650 basis points over Libor.

Smaller environmental footprint

The company is part of Teekay Offshore, which has been bought from Teekay Corp by alternative asset manager Brookfield, which intends to take the company private.

Its 31 tankers (including newbuildings) make Teekay Shuttle the largest player in the market, with a share of around 35%. It has a forward contract book of $2.5bn, with 70% of its business from fixed-rate “take-or-pay” contracts, putting it on a comparatively ­secure financial footing.

At face value, the company’s newbuildings appear to be a significant step forward in terms of their environmental footprint.

It is a microcosm of the contradictions faced by Norway in particular and shipping globally in general. Norway, an economy that has grown rich on oil and gas, is eager to champion green policies but remains reluctant to kill a polluting industry

The four suezmax DP4 shuttle tankers are being built in South Korea by Samsung Heavy Industries based on Teekay Shuttle’s E-shuttle design and are due for delivery in late 2019 and 2020.

They will burn LNG rather than conventional bunkers, and will have equipment to contain and burn other volatile organic compounds. The ships will also feature battery-powered hybrid technology for peak load shaving and fuel saving.

Teekay Shuttle claims the vessels will cut SOx emissions by 99%, particulates by 93% and NOx by 88%. ­Perhaps most notably, they will cut CO2 emissions by 47%. That in effect hits the IMO goal of a 50% reduction in CO2 in 2020, 30 years ahead of its 2050 schedule.

In fact, the shipowner says its quartet will cut CO2 emissions by more than all the Teslas ­currently on Norwegian roads.

CO2 cuts offered by the four ships are equal to 60,000 of the high-cost electric cars, 42,516 of which had been sold in Norway by the end of June this year.

Although there are no official standards for judging so-called green bonds, voluntary principles are ­issued by the International Capital Market Association, which lays down a framework that most companies follow.

Under the principles, Teekay Shuttle’s green bonds were judged “light green” by Cicero, a sustainability consultancy.

The Norwegian government has bought into the project by giving $22m in subsidies from the environmental agency Enova.

Yet despite the lower environmental impact of the new tankers, some investors were clearly wary, if not of the vessels themselves, then of the fact that they will be used to help Norway’s Equinor extract hydrocarbons from the North Sea.

Amid a booming market for green bonds and despite the heavyweight backing of joint lead managers Danske Bank, DNB, Nordea and SEB, Teekay Shuttle’s bond raised only $125m, compared with the $150m target in the offer documents and a maximum set at $200m.

Investors’ reluctance appears to have been driven by the contradictions in the project, with cleaner technology being put to work in an inherently dirty industry.

It is a microcosm of the contradictions faced by Norway in particular and shipping globally in general. Norway, an economy that has grown rich on oil and gas, is eager to champion green policies but remains reluctant to kill a polluting industry.

Similarly, shipping can slash emissions and cut its environmental footprint — as Teekay Shuttle shows — but is wedded to carrying the world’s oil, gas and coal that makes up 40% of its business.

Clearly, industry and investors would benefit from the environmental debate being more than a binary question of “Green: yes or no?”

As the Bank of England governor Mark Carney has argued, there is a need for “50 shades of green” to ­finance change. However, that is unlikely to satisfy the increasingly radical global environmental movement.