The second day's opening panel at SIBCON 2026, Decarbonising Shipping: From Pilots to Scale. Image Credit: Ship & Bunker

Bunker fuel pilots are like the concept cars of new marine fuels, proving what is possible but not that they are commercially viable or have the ability to scale, the opening keynote panel of the second day of SIBCON 2026 in Singapore heard on Thursday.

Scale comes only when credible demand, supply investment, and policy move at the same pace, delegates were told.

A pilot proves a solution works, but what makes it investable is the claim it can support, the panel heard: when emissions data is collected at the right points along the chain, witnessed, and verified by an independent third party, the result can be tied to commercial or regulatory value, such as fewer EU allowances to surrender.

A fuel project reaches a final investment decision only when its risks have been identified, allocated to the parties best placed to carry them, and priced, delegates heard.

When it comes to a global regulatory framework expected to drive the uptake of new fuels, the chance of an IMO deal in December is seen as higher than six months ago, the panel heard, because several member states see it as the last best moment to secure a technically agreed structure.

Confidence to make 20- to 30-year asset decisions will come from the detail of the framework rather than its adoption: eligible feedstocks, certification, chain of custody, and the consequences of non-compliance.

Safety, meanwhile, is an enabler of performance, not a requirement, and rests on aligned standards, competent crews, and repeatability, because every operation on every day has to be safe.

On the risk of LNG dual-fuel newbuilds becoming stranded assets under a stricter IMO measure, the answer was diversification: concentration risk kills.

The panel was moderated by James Forsdyke, managing director of the Lloyd's Register Maritime Decarbonisation Hub, with Dean Gockel, vice president, Asia Pacific energy products, at ExxonMobil Asia Pacific, Gerbrand Vroegop, managing director, global lead of shipping and head of transport and logistics APAC, at ING, Houda Dabboussi, president of Shell Marine, and Prof. Lynn Loo, chief executive of the Global Centre for Maritime Decarbonisation (GCMD).

Below are some of the 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.

Where the IMO Talks Stand

• The technical track has largely settled the treatment of most fuel pathways; still open are the shape of the emissions reduction curve, how it tightens over time, and the reward for first movers into zero and near-zero fuels.
• A move from a double reduction curve to a single curve is under discussion, and the latest technical submissions were about how conventional fossil fuels are treated under the framework's lifecycle rules, after earlier rounds settled the treatment of biofuels and LNG.
• A softer curve would mean thinner funding for pilots, but flexibility mechanisms under discussion could give the industry more ways to invest directly.
• As drafted, the framework treats LNG as a standard fossil pathway and gives suppliers no incentive to cut upstream methane emissions.
• A biofuel producer meeting aviation and European rules already works to two checklists, and the IMO's will be a third unless standards are brought together.
• On how emissions are reduced, the framework should judge fuels on their measured well-to-wake performance and let every fuel and technology compete on that basis, the panel heard, rather than favouring particular fuels.
• A global framework needs to be performance-driven and recognise the real well-to-wake performance of a fuel, but that standard is technology and fuel neutral, not performance-neutral.

Pilots That Changed Rules

• GCMD has run 14 pilots and trials with 140 partners in five years, but a solution working is not the same as a solution being adopted.
• A carbon capture pilot in China offloaded 25 mt of CO2 captured on board, had it reclassified from waste to cargo, and tracked it to an offtaker making calcium carbonate; the IMO has since recognised mineralisation as a pathway, and the shipowner's EU allowance surrender was cut.
• GCMD trials have bunkered 14,400 mt of biofuel at ports including Singapore and Rotterdam, using tracers to confirm feedstock provenance and extended use on one working vessel to watch quality and engine wear.
• That evidence, submitted to the IMO with IBIA, led to a rule change allowing conventional bunker tankers to carry blends above 25% biofuel, up to 30%, now implemented in Singapore.
• An ammonia ship-to-ship transfer in Western Australia moved 2,700 mt between two gas carriers and back after nine months of safety work borrowed from land-side ammonia handling.
• Its learnings have fed SGMF's bunkering guidelines and Singapore's ammonia bunkering technical reference, and a bulk carrier bunkered with ammonia in Zhoushan is now sailing to Pilbara.

The LNG Lesson

• The industry has reached 222 LNG bunkering locations, and Shell's LNG Outlook sees bunker demand rising sevenfold to about 27 million mt by 2035.
• Bio-LNG did not have to start where LNG started: on the same infrastructure it went from nothing to 22 locations in under a year, and from pilot to long-term contracts in the same span.
• LNG scales because it is competitive, cuts GHG emissions, uses the existing supply chain, and bridges to bio and synthetic LNG; policy, affordability, and demand have to align for any other fuel to do the same.

Finance

• Renewables are a small part of a broad world and compete for the same lending as everything else, so funds go where risk and return look best, to data centres today and perhaps food or energy tomorrow; the balance is slowly moving the right way.
• A December decision on the IMO's Net-Zero Framework would give better visibility of fuel demand, which is what lets producers and the rest of the system move.
• A bank is judged on how its clients run safety, delegates heard, so a shipowner's safety record sits alongside credit risk in the lending decision: lenders with people who have been to sea can read that operational risk, and owners who are open about how they manage it win internal backing for their projects and a longer-term relationship.

Safety and Standards

• No single part of the value chain can make a new fuel safe alone, and fragmentation of standards across vessels, ports, regulators, and emergency response is a bigger risk than cost.
• Singapore Standard SS727 for LNG was cited as the kind of standard, developed with the MPA, that lets a supplier bring an LNG offer to life safely.

Demand and Compliance

• The panel heard that 2025 was the year customers ran pilots and learned how certification and bunkering work. 2026 has been about compliance and repeating it.
• Once owners have seen that a fuel can be bunkered safely and certified, voluntary uptake follows, driven by cargo owners wanting green fuel and by voluntary targets.
• Nobody can wait for perfection, because perfection does not exist; the answer is to act with optionality.
• Decarbonisation, the session concluded, is about resilience through diversification.