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

LNG bunkering demand is set to double within two to three years as the orderbook delivers, and the challenge is not the availability of molecules but getting them to ships in the ports they now call, the LNG panel at SIBCON 2026 in Singapore heard on Thursday.

More than 400 LNG dual-fuel vessels come online next year, delegates were told, and the LNG-bunkering sector now enters a critical moment as it develops a barge network with the agility to be not just in primary ports such as Rotterdam, Shanghai, and Singapore, but in whichever of the many secondary ports LNG-powered ships call at.

Following recent disruptions to LNG supply, the panel heard that the molecules will be there, with two waves of new supply coming from the US and Qatar into a global LNG market of 400 million to 500 million tonnes of which bunkering is a tiny part.

So the bunker industry will have a say in whether the molecules will be where customers need them, but not the price.

LNG's long-term play is the transition to bio-LNG, and the biggest threat to that trajectory is regulatory uncertainty, delegates heard, with still no direction from IMO and a lack of alignment on certification schemes on different continents.

Mass balancing is also critical to scaling bio-LNG across continents, the panel heard, because it gives access to production without adding infrastructure cost.

Singapore's LNG terminal has seen bunkering grow by about 50% a year for the past three years and the expectation is for the LNG-fuelled fleet to go from 1,000 ships to 2,000 within a few years.

Singapore will respond with a third jetty and a second terminal giving it the capacity to deliver 3 million to 4 million tonnes a year to LNG bunkering.

Work under way in Singapore could also link the European and Singapore bio-LNG systems through a green corridor, the panel heard.

On pricing, today's spread between LNG and VLSFO looks as poor as it did in 2022, delegates were told, but owners ordering LNG-fuelled ships are investing for 25 to 35 years and the picture over any five-year window looks more favourable.

The panel was moderated by Mark Bell, general manager and chief operating officer of The Society for Gas as a Marine Fuel (SGMF), with Atul Nargund, senior vice president, LNG market and business solutions, at Singapore LNG Corporation, Bryan Frey, chief commercial officer of Seaside LNG, Denis Bonhomme, LNG bunker business development director at TotalEnergies, Farid Trad, vice president, bunkering and energy transition, at CMA CGM, and Nacho de Miguel, head of LNG, alternative fuels and sustainability at Peninsula.

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.

Getting the Fuel to the Ship

• Suppliers are adding LNG bunker barges including a new one in Singapore, one in Oman alongside new liquefaction facilities there to serve customers outside the Gulf, and a second in Rotterdam owned 50-50 by a supplier and a liner company that went upstream to secure its own delivery capacity.
• Some key areas of the world still have no LNG bunker supply, and there is a reason: starting an offer in a new port is not just a matter of time-chartering a bunker vessel.
• LNG is traded worldwide, but there is not necessarily accessible storage at that location, the LNG that is there may belong to someone else and not be dedicated to bunkering, and local regulation has to allow it.
• Suppliers will invest in their part of the chain if demand is certain, but conventional bunkers only ever gave short- or medium-term visibility, never enough to cover assets like these.
• LNG import terminals built for large carriers can serve bunker vessels too: Singapore's handles everything from Q-Max carriers down to 8,000 cbm and turns bunker vessels round quickly. Others were urged to open up the same way.
• In the US, the only pipeline-fed onshore marine bunkering facility is sold out to Disney Cruise Line and TOTE. Large-scale exporters are said to not want small bunker vessels disrupting their berths.
• Small-scale projects on the Gulf Coast at Galveston and Freeport, at Philadelphia, and in South Florida are being developed.

Resilience

• A supplier's three jobs are security of supply, through barges, slots, and terminals; flexibility, through diversity of supply, with one supplier proud not to have declared force majeure after the Middle East events; and affordability, where the tool is hedging, including the LNG-to-VLSFO spread, rather than control of the price.

Regulation

• The past three years of uncertainty made it harder for some to get investment decisions approved, with the preference to assume more disruption every few years and to stay nimble on fuel choice across LNG, fuel oil, and ammonia rather than bet on one.
• But projects are going ahead with a liner company said to have invested in a biomethane production plant, a decade-long bet made despite the regulatory uncertainty.

Bio-LNG

• Mass balancing needs clear rules without a chain of intermediaries that end up adding to the price of the product.
• Singapore's LNG terminal is now ISCC-certified to handle bio-LNG, under the biomethane memorandum signed with the port authority this week.

The LNG Case

• The LNG bunker market has roughly doubled from about 2 million tonnes two years ago, with about 950 LNG-fuelled ships in service and 750 on order, and suppliers are said to remain bullish whatever happens to the spread against conventional fuel.
• But there could be a shortage of infrastructure as the ordered ships hit the water, which will take five to 10 years for the industry to catch up on.
• LNG also cuts NOx, SOx, and particulates in port, a health benefit that gets forgotten, and the trajectory remains that it is a first step into decarbonisation that extends into bio-LNG.
• The lesson from LNG for the fuels that follow: it was "everywhere and nowhere" at the start, traded in vast quantities as cargo but unavailable as bunkers.
• Methane slip is LNG's "Achilles heel", and the industry has to get it right.