Fuelre4m is selling the fuel industry the one thing it never counted: what it wastes
Rob Mortimer came to combustion chemistry from telecoms engineering. The people he recruited came from property, radio communications and, in one case, acting. None of them had spent decades inside the fuel industry absorbing the received wisdom about which questions were already settled, and Mortimer now cites that absence of pedigree as the reason Fuelre4m exists at all.
The problem he walked into is one the energy transition has largely stepped around. Global industry will keep burning liquid fuel for years across maritime freight, mining, ports, logistics, and power generation, and the replacement cycle for engines and heavy machinery spans decades. Roughly a quarter of the fuel entering a typical engine fails to combust properly and leaves through the exhaust as emissions and waste, a loss the industry has treated as an operating cost of owning an engine. The decarbonisation conversation has concentrated almost entirely on which fuel the industry might use in a decade, and the fuel already sitting in the tank goes on being used badly.
“Decarbonisation is not only about changing the fuel. It is also about wasting far less of it,” Mortimer said.
The team’s outsider background became its working method
Evidence turned up first in generator testing, where measured NOx and other emissions fell by more than 50% and fuel consumption dropped repeatedly by 15% to 20%. Mortimer’s account of that moment is characteristically dry. “When results move that far, you either pay attention or find a new career,” he said.
The more consequential discovery came later through vibration analysis, which showed combustion occurring more consistently across the cylinders and pointed to lower engine stress, reduced vibration and smoother torque delivery. The company’s understanding of its own product widened at that point to cover combustion, thermal, engine and drivetrain losses across the whole energy path. Re4mx conditions fuel before it reaches the combustion chamber, reforming the way it is structured and dispersed so it mixes and burns more evenly, and the treatment requires no engine modification, no control remapping and no infrastructure replacement.
“Even the best chef struggles when the ingredients arrive in a wheelbarrow,” Mortimer said, describing the logic in the plainest terms he could manage.
The team was assembled around an appetite for awkward questions. Mortimer describes the opening conversation with a new operator as an exercise in locating where the result hides inside their existing operation, and he is comfortable inverting the burden of proof onto the customer. “We also challenge them: measure it properly, control the variables and prove that it does not work,” he said, adding that “so far, the data has been stubbornly on our side.”
Scepticism is the barrier every efficiency claim inherits
Any company selling combustion efficiency walks into decades of accumulated distrust. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has evaluated or tested more than 100 purported fuel-saving devices and additives without identifying a single product that significantly improves fuel economy. Of 104 devices assessed in one widely cited tally, seven showed any improvement at all, and none exceeded 6%. The Federal Trade Commission has issued repeated warnings about savings claims in the 12% to 25% range, the exact band Fuelre4m sells into.
Mortimer has acknowledged as much publicly, telling Cruise Industry News that the biggest obstacle facing the company is the assumption that the claim is too good to be true. His answer has been to make third-party operational data the entire sales process, which costs more and takes longer than marketing.
The commercial model follows directly from that. Fuelre4m runs paid, monitored trials before any long-term supply agreement, establishing an operational baseline, applying the technology and measuring consumption, emissions and performance indicators under comparable conditions. Successful trials convert into recurring supply tied to the customer’s ongoing fuel use, which ties the company’s revenue to results the customer can see in their own data. “We are not selling an interesting theory in a bottle. We are selling measurable operational improvement,” Mortimer said.
Industrial contracts now carry the evidence
The most substantial validation to date came from Holcim UK, which agreed a national rollout of Re4mx across more than 200 sites after three years of real-world testing, with trials showing up to 20% lower fuel consumption and up to 23% fewer emissions from the fuel burned. Holcim tracked results using its standard fuel flow and engine monitoring tools, so the numbers came out of ordinary working conditions on ordinary instrumentation. Edern Lalanne, Supply Chain Director at Holcim UK, described the agreement as the product of meticulous testing and operational learning.
Maritime deployments have followed the same sequence. Bontrup Logistics selected the technology for a bulk carrier supporting a Pacific climate resilience project after a three-month trial on a sister vessel, and Fuelre4m has run trials with tanker operator Ardmore Shipping. Rail testing produced a 9% reduction in fuel consumption over three days before any engine cleanup effect. Distribution runs through a virtual distribution model already operating across Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.
The Desert Vipers partnership, which extended this year into lead partner status for the ExxonMobil Guyana Global Super League, gives the company a public platform for an argument otherwise buried in engine data. The franchise has been unusually rigorous about measurement, publishing sustainability reporting and setting a 50% emissions reduction target for 2028. “The Desert Vipers do not treat sustainability as a slogan,” Mortimer said.
The competition separates along lines of capital cost
The addressable market is large and expanding steadily. Fortune Business Insights values the global fuel additives market at $10.29 billion in 2025, growing at 5.9% annually to reach $17.15 billion by 2034, with Future Market Insights putting diesel applications at roughly 46% of demand across logistics, mining, construction and agriculture. Chemical majors including Lubrizol, Afton Chemical, BASF, Infineum and Innospec dominate that spend, and their additive packages address deposit control, cetane improvement and cold flow, leaving combustion efficiency as a secondary claim.
The nearest competition sits in maritime fuel treatment. Aderco, the Belgian plant-based fuel conditioner specialist, offers the closest comparison, with customers treating more than 2,000 vessels and over 40 billion litres of fuel a year, and savings verified by classification societies ABS and RINA under Gold Standard methodology. Its verified figures run considerably more conservatively, with one bulk carrier project documenting a 3.25% reduction in fuel use, and the distance between that number and Fuelre4m’s is the question the market will eventually settle through class-verified data. Germany’s FUELSAVE occupies the capital-equipment end of the same problem with a retrofit hydrogen syngas generator that injects gas and a water-methanol mix into the engine air intake.
Operators are weighing all of this against voyage optimisation software, air lubrication systems, rotor sails, hull coatings and the alternative fuel pathways of LNG, methanol and ammonia, all of which draw on the same compliance budget. Each carries capital expenditure, retrofit downtime or fuel availability risk, and each has a payback horizon measured in years. A tank-side treatment competes on the speed of the result.
Regulatory delay has raised the value of near-term efficiency
Timing has favoured the company in ways nobody at Fuelre4m engineered. IMO member states voted 57 to 49 in October 2025 to postpone adoption of the Net Zero Framework by a year, a package that would have created the first legally binding global carbon price for any sector. Adoption has moved to October 2026, and operational compliance now looks unlikely before 2028. Vessel operators still face the EU emissions trading system, FuelEU Maritime and Carbon Intensity Indicator ratings through that period, and they face all of it without the regulatory certainty required to commit capital to a single fuel pathway.
Mining runs on similar arithmetic. Worley, citing Australian Renewable Energy Agency figures, puts Australian mining diesel consumption at roughly five billion litres a year, with fuel accounting for as much as AUD 1 billion of annual operating expenditure at a large open-cut operation. Electrification of haul fleets remains years away at scale for most operators, and every year of delay is another year of fuel burned at current efficiency.
Fuelre4m has been built organically on seed funding from minority investors, and the immediate priority is scaling into maritime and mining before moving through ports, power generation, logistics, rail and aviation. Mortimer’s ambition runs wider than his order book, and it concerns where the industry has aimed its attention for the past decade.
“We are not claiming that one technology solves climate change. We are saying that wasting 15% to 20% of a resource and ignoring the opportunity to recover it is no longer acceptable,” he said.
