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On the weekend of August 16, the bunkering vessel Haigang Zhiyuan delivered 8,016 metric tonnes of domestically produced green methanol to the dual-fuel container ship CMA CGM Osmium at Yangshan Port in Shanghai. Shanghai Customs supervised the operation. It is the largest single green methanol bunkering on record. The operation brought together Shanghai Electric, Shanghai International Port Group, and CMA CGM, with the fuel supplied principally from Shanghai Electric's Taona

[Photo by Bayu Tiyo on Unsplash] Ask a bunker buyer who they bought their last stem from and you will usually get a company name. Ask what that company's role was in the transaction and the answer is less certain than it should be. The confusion is widespread and it is not the buyer's fault. The three roles in marine fuel supply are genuinely distinct in law and in risk, but the market presents them inconsistently, some companies perform more than one, and the commercial conv

Fuel is sold by mass and, for most of the industry's history, delivered by volume. That single mismatch is the origin of nearly every quantity dispute in bunkering, and it is the gap that decades of tradecraft have been built to exploit. The stakes have risen with the price. With VLSFO running past $910 per metric ton in the spring of 2026, a two percent discrepancy on a mid-sized stem costs upward of $15,000 before the vessel has left the berth. Service providers who conduct

Buying fuel looks, from a distance, like buying anything else. You ask for a price, you accept one, the product arrives, you pay. In practice, a bunker stem is a sequence of six or seven distinct stages, each generating its own document, and the buyer's leverage in any subsequent dispute is determined almost entirely by what was done, or not done, at the right stage. The uncomfortable truth of most bunker claims is that they were lost before anyone knew there was a problem. T