The shipowner's fuel map of tomorrow panel at SIBCON 2026. Image Credit: Ship & Bunker

The key design question for a ship ordered today is not what fuel flexibility it has on delivery but what flexibility it has for its fuel system to be changed or adapted five or 10 years on, the panel on the shipowner's fuel map at SIBCON 2026 in Singapore heard on Thursday.

Asked how fleets will look in 2030, owners said this was the wrong horizon, given that ships ordered today will still be trading in 2050.

And while the panel echoed previous SIBCON sessions in agreeing fuel flexibility was key, here delegates were told this was less about picking a dual-fuel configuration today and more about designing in flexibility so that the fuel configuration can be changed in the future.

Newbuilds are now increasingly specified with such design considerations in mind, delegates were told.

Of course a flexible retrofit does not preclude dual-fuel ships, with such tonnage on the container orderbook having doubled since 2023 to about 650, driven mainly by EU regulation.

Decarbonisation is not only about ordering new ships, the panel heard, and as much work has gone into the existing fleet, through retrofits, digitalisation, and network optimisation, to cut the amount of fuel today's ships burn.

Despite the efforts, some owners felt that many of the shippers whose cargo they will carry, particularly on price-sensitive trades, are still not ready to pay for greener transport.

Other owners felt almost all of their efforts on greener fuels have been voluntary and paid from their own pockets, delegates were told.

The panel was moderated by Joey Ng, global head of decarbonisation and fuel transition at Braemar, with Chia Yujin, head of operations and procurement, China, at Pacific International Lines (PIL), Dinesh Kumar Balraj, senior director and head of fleet operations east at A.P. Møller-Maersk, Capt. Vijayachelvan Silva Raju, head of global operations at X-Press Feeders, and Yeoh Sau Kin, chief executive of Jurong Port Universal Terminal.

Below are other 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.

The Orderbook

• In September 2026, 37% of container ship newbuild orders were dual-fuel, the same share as in September 2023, but twice the number: about 650 methanol and LNG dual-fuel container ships on order against about 330 then.
• Decarbonisation has progressed well despite the lack of direction from IMO last October, driven in part by EU rules.
• The first Asian carrier to order dual-fuel LNG ships, in 2022, expects about a third of its fleet to be dual-fuel LNG by 2030, with bio-LNG and e-LNG as the bridge and mass balancing, if the industry gets it right, enough to keep those ships compliant to 2050.

Fuel Choices

• Feeders spend most of their time in port, so their CII suffers; shore power on arrival would do more for them than any at-sea optimisation.
• LNG was seen as suiting larger ships, and the alcohol pathway of ethanol and methanol together now widens the flexibility options further for what was previously a methanol-centric pathway.
• Methanol is more flexible than LNG on operating profile and ship size, which is why a carrier with dual-fuel LNG on its larger ships expects to add methanol tonnage rather than more of the same.
• Methanol also suits small feeders in niche ports because it needs almost no new port infrastructure.
• Whatever the fuel, ships trading to Africa and Latin America need larger tanks for endurance, because alternative fuel will not be as available on those routes.
• Large ammonia-fuelled container ships were seen as unlikely because container terminals would find ammonia bunkering hard to accept given the time it takes due to the lower energy density, and the risk to people due to ammonia's toxicity.
• Consideration of the well-to-wake impact of an alternative fuel is important and where an alternative fuel is produced matters, because the transport emissions to get it to the ship count against it.
• Owning ships is capital-intensive enough, so owners should partner with infrastructure players rather than buy infrastructure themselves.

Ports and Terminals

• Drop-in fuels can be handled by reconfiguring a terminal's existing tanks in six months to a year at modest cost, while LNG, ammonia, and hydrogen are capital-intensive and design-specific, and terminals need shipowners at the table to design for them.
• Smaller terminals will not be able to offer every fuel, even where it is available, as they will not have the scale to make it commercially sustainable.
• Orderbooks for LNG and methanol give a terminal some surety of offtake and base load, but ship ordering is the tail end of the decision chain and comes late for an asset that takes years to build.
• Existing fuels still power about 93% of vessels, so capital also has to keep going into the infrastructure that serves today's customers.
• Singapore's regulator has given the signals a terminal needs: a technical reference for methanol bunkering (TR 139), sampling standards for LNG, and an ammonia reference announced this week, with the regulator stopping short of picking the fuel.
• Chinese ports are investing in LNG bunker barges ahead of demand and encouraging terminals to accept simultaneous operations, so that a ship using alternative fuel is not penalised on its berth window.

Charterers and Shippers

• Green fuel prices are higher and will only fall with volume, so more owners have to commit before producers can offer the scale that brings the price down to what cargo owners will pay.
• When chartering, the questions are the ship's CII and who bears the cost of missing it; most container ship non-operating owners have built efficient tonnage rather than dual-fuel.
• Planning beyond 2030 is hard with no regulatory certainty.
• A feeder operator is training crews on methanol now because it will not find them in 2035, and keeping that pool is an investment as much as the ships are.

Looking to 2035

• Scaling goes beyond the fuel: the fuel has to be available, the infrastructure in place, the crews trained, and the certifications issued before any of it works.
• Not all owners and operators are waiting on the IMO: some have concluded that flexibility is the answer whatever happens and have ordered vessels accordingly; what is needed is alignment on that approach between owners, ports, infrastructure, and regulators so that the fuels scale and become commercially viable.
• Regulatory clarity, the orderbook, and supply for LNG and perhaps ethanol give enough direction for a terminal to refine its plans with customers bilaterally.
• Owners should share what they learn about new fuels, because first movers spend a long time on safety discussions with terminals that the next mover should not have to repeat.