The maritime digitalisation panel at SIBCON 2026. Image Credit: Ship & Bunker

Singapore has spent a decade addressing measurement integrity for bunkers by the use of mass flow meters; over the next decade the challenge expands from measurement integrity to data integrity, the panel on maritime digitalisation at SIBCON 2026 in Singapore heard on Wednesday.

Confidence over who signed the electronic bunker delivery note, which meter it came from, which barge and which port call it belongs to, and whether the system that produced it had been tampered with, becomes essential as a digitally signed document from a compromised system is just a signed lie.

As industry digitalisation progresses, monitoring for cyber attacks therefore becomes an increasingly important part of bunkering integrity, delegates were told.

The bunker community should agree a common cyber-assurance baseline that someone can audit, as tanker and bulk owners are audited today.

The industry does not lack technology but suffers from fragmentation, delegates heard: the same information is keyed into several systems that do not talk to each other, so the answer is not another platform but rather interoperability, connecting the "little islands" so that a BDN can carry several sources of truth, from the meter, the terminal, the lab, and the surveyor, rather than one.

Data belongs to everyone who is party to a transaction, the panel said in answer to a question from the floor on who owns it, and it can be protected with digital identity, encryption, and authorisation keys that decide which people, and which AI agents, may read it.

With use of AI growing rapidly, it can already reconcile emails, messages, meter readings, and AIS positions that describe the same bunkering from different angles, validate documents before an invoice is paid, and spot anomalies in a barge's systems, the panel agreed.

The human stays in the loop for every safety and operational decision, including whether to isolate a compromised system.

The panel was moderated by Joey Chua, chair of the digitalisation committee of the Singapore Shipping Association, with Dr Christian Plum, head of fuel supply planning at A.P. Møller-Maersk, Dennis Teo, regional director, APAC, at CyberOwl, Leon Ling, co-founder and chief executive of BunkerChain, and Mohamed Abdenbi, solution business manager at Endress+Hauser.

Below are the key takeaways from the session that was held under the Chatham House rule, so what follows is reported without attributing any point to an individual speaker.

From Measurement to Data

• Singapore's mass flow meter success rested on a traceable measurement, a standard of its own in SS 648, a strong regulatory framework, and enforcement.
• Other ports that mandated meters without the standard and the enforcement have moved more slowly.
• Unvalidated data fed into invoicing or an AI model skews results, so trust has to follow the data past the meter into every system it enters.
• Mass flow meters now go on about 90% of newbuilds, and some owners fit bunker metering across whole fleets for more accurate bunker consumption and CO2 accounting.

Cyber Risk

• There are three main cyber risks: manipulation of the source (a compromised barge system producing false BDNs and invoices), third-party remote access by vendors for calibration and updates, and disruption, since a barge that cannot issue BDNs creates congestion across the port.
• There are three answers: visibility of every managed and unmanaged device connected to the barge's systems, control over what remote access each integrator gets, and an incident response and backup plan for the day the BDN cannot be released.

Connecting the Islands

• Connecting Singapore's terminals digitally produced optimisation between barges and the discharge of fuel, and gave a level of traceability that paper records could never give: "You cannot do analytics on a piece of paper. It's going to take you a long time."
• Mass flow meter data can be encrypted into the BDN so the figures cannot be edited, and payloads from the meter maker, the lab, and the certificate of quality (CoQ) can be embedded in a PDF so any recipient can validate them independently; a white paper on detecting tampered data is available.
• Start digital-first where things are new, such as new fuels and new regulations, and build inwards from there, because people are fixed in their ways for both good and bad reasons. Digitalisation has to earn its place with direct value.
• Standards such as SS 709 are what let systems talk to each other at all, down to naming conventions for fuel types, and enforcement of them is what unlocks the value.
• The source of truth doesn't come only from one place: for example on quantity, class might be one of them, but data from the mass flow meter itself encrypted into the BDN can also validate this.

Terminals and Loading

• Discrepancies between what a terminal declares and what a barge's meter receives will always exist and can reach 2% to 3% of the loaded quantity, which is a lot of fuel for a barge operator to carry into the next transaction.
• Terminals are starting to install mass flow meters on their jetties in Asia and Europe, since tank gauging is not traceable in the way the meter is, and the goal is one harmonised measurement along the chain.

Fuels and Compliance

• Digitalisation has to carry the fuel transition: a history of two or three grades is heading for up to 10, with regulations that are vessel-specific or fleet-specific.
• Fuel decisions for one ship can no longer be isolated from its effect on the fleet's FuelEU Maritime or CII position.
• That needs systems that show the consequences of each choice and a portfolio view that can change as, for example, LNG gets cheaper or dearer.

AI

• Near term uses for AI include interpreting post-bunkering data, optimising and auto-scheduling barges, and flagging a late bunkering to the next job so another barge can be assigned.
• The concrete value today is structuring unstructured data, so that a person is shown the one or two conflicts worth chasing rather than cross-checking ten things that are fine.
• "Don't be afraid of AI... explore, explore, explore" was the message: it is controllable, and whether to press a button to isolate the system away from the bunker craft, "that depends on the human. It depends on the master and the bunker craft operator."