More fuel than any other port on earth
Singapore sold 56.77 million tonnes of marine fuel in 2025 — a record, up 3.4% on 2024, and comfortably more than any other port in the world. Ships made 42,603 bunker calls to take it on, at an average conventional stem of 1,319 tonnes. For scale: the fuel sold in Singapore in a year outweighs the cargo throughput of most mid-sized ports, and industry estimates put it at roughly a fifth of global bunker demand. Bunkering is not a sideline of the port; it is one of the port’s core products, and a reason shipowners route through the Strait at all. A vessel that can refuel, restock and change crew during a cargo call saves a deviation somewhere else.
The geography does most of the selling. Singapore sits on the main Asia–Europe artery, beside the world’s busiest transhipment hub — 3.22 billion gross tonnes of vessel arrivals in 2025 — with refining and storage on Jurong Island behind the anchorages. What turns the geography into a durable franchise is regulation.
The headline figure sits inside a record port year across the board — the container and cargo side of which is covered in the companion logistics and port article.
What ships actually burned in 2025
Ship & Bunker’s analysis of MPA data breaks the volume down. Very-low-sulphur fuel oil remained the largest product at 28.83 million tonnes, though it slipped 2.5% on the year. High-sulphur fuel oil — burned legally by ships fitted with exhaust scrubbers — grew 7.8% to 21.73 million tonnes, lifting its share to 38.7% of sales. Distillates rose 10.7% to 4.27 million tonnes. Bio-blended fuels jumped 55.6% to 1.36 million tonnes, and pure B100 biofuel reached 25,500 tonnes.
Read closely, the 2025 mix carries an uncomfortable message: the fastest-growing conventional fuel was the dirtiest one. HSFO’s rise reflects scrubber economics — the spread between high- and low-sulphur fuel pays for the equipment — not decarbonisation. The green transition at the world’s largest bunker hub is real, but in 2025 it was still smaller than the movement in the opposite direction.
A licence for everything: how the MPA polices the trade
Every participant in Singapore bunkering holds a Maritime and Port Authority licence — around 39 licensed suppliers at the last count, with separate registers for bunker-craft operators and surveyors. The structural reform that set Singapore apart came in metering: from 1 January 2017 every fuel-oil delivery has had to pass through an approved mass-flow meter, extended to distillates from 1 July 2019 — a world first that largely ended the quantity disputes that plague the trade elsewhere. The discipline is now digital as well as metered: electronic bunker delivery notes became mandatory from April 2025, and MPA reported every licensed supplier operating digital bunkering by August of that year.
The licence is also the enforcement tool: a supplier that fails the metering and documentation standards can lose it. The credibility of the Singapore bunker delivery note — metered, digital, auditable — is a genuine competitive advantage over looser ports.
The alternative-fuel build-out is deliberate, licensed and early
Alternative fuels reached 1.95 million tonnes in 2025, up from 1.35 million in 2024: 1.38 million tonnes of biofuel blends, 571,400 tonnes of LNG (up 23.1%) and 3,013 tonnes of methanol. That is 3.4% of total sales — material, growing fast, and still small.
The next phase is being run the same way the last one was: by licence. In November 2025 MPA named three companies — Golden Island, Global Energy Trading and PetroChina International — to receive five-year methanol bunkering licences from 2026, and it opened applications for new LNG supply licences in January 2026. Ammonia is earlier still: no commercial volumes appeared in the 2025 figures. The honest reading is that Singapore is building the regulatory scaffolding for fuels whose demand has not yet arrived, on the logic that the port that can supply every fuel keeps every customer.
Who supplies it
The MPA’s 2025 top-supplier list — published alphabetically, not ranked — mixes oil majors, trading-house arms and homegrown independents. Three of the names sit on the Singapore Industry Index record: PetroChina International (Singapore), a long-standing volume leader now also holding one of the three methanol licences; Sinopec Fuel Oil (Singapore), the Singapore arm of the Chinese refiner; and TFG Marine, Trafigura’s physical bunkering business. Around the majors runs a Singapore-headquartered independent tier — Consort Bunkers, an MPA-licensed supplier operating across Singapore, China and the Arabian Gulf with a SIRE-benchmarked fleet, is representative — plus the craft operators whose barges physically deliver every stem. The trade’s structure mirrors the port itself: global names on the licence list, Singapore companies on the water.