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The International WorkBoat Show returns to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans December 2-4. More than 1,000 exhibitors, upwards of 13,000 attendees, and the one US trade event where the inland, harbor towing, and offshore support segments all show up in the same building. Nord Young will be there. Not exhibiting this year, just walking the floor. The conference program has not been fully published yet, so this is a preview of the exhibit floor rather than a

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

In March 2014, OW Bunker listed on the Copenhagen exchange. It was Denmark's third largest company by revenue and the largest marine fuel supplier in the world. Eight months later it was in bankruptcy, thirteen banks were owed $750 million, and shipowners across every major trading region were discovering that they might have to pay for the same bunkers twice. The collapse produced a decade of litigation across multiple jurisdictions, a UK Supreme Court decision that reclassi

There is a gap at the center of the marine fuel industry that catches operators out with striking regularity. A cargo of fuel can be delivered fully compliant with the ISO 8217 specification stated in the contract, pass an independent laboratory test against every parameter in the relevant table, and still wreck an engine. The specification and the engine's tolerance are two different things, set by two different bodies, for two different purposes, and the distance between th

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