“As a natural progression of trade flows, it will make more sense to bunker at the load ports rather than halfway in between,” International Bunker Industry Association (IBIA) chief executive Peter Hall told Seatrade Global on the sidelines of the IBIA Annual Convention 2013 in Hong Kong on Tuesday.
As a corollary to this, it followed that the Chinese ports as well as Hong Kong would start to gain prominence in the bunkering scene as more mainline calls start to go directly from North Asia to the west, he added. “We will see the biggest changes over the next 10 years that we have ever seen in the marine fuel supply industry and IBIA wants to support that,” Hall said.
However, he did not believe there would be big winners and losers from these new dynamics. Rather, it would be more likely that there would be a levelling out of the market, with some of the current smaller players such as Shanghai and Hong Kong possibly gaining market share at the expense of market giants such as Singapore. As such bunker supply players will be more evenly distributed in future.
For this to happen however, there must be more consistency in service delivery. To this end, Hall said there is a need to institute higher standards such as the use of mass flow metering more widely. While some ports may not see the value in this yet, others such as Shanghai are starting to realize the benefits of building a cluster of maritime services around the city. As its much vaunted special economic zone starts to take off, it is inevitable that a maritime services cluster, driven to some extent by bunkering services will follow.
Keynote speaker, Hong Kong undersecretary for the environment Christine Loh meanwhile reiterated her vision for Hong Kong’s role in the shipping industry. “Our vision is for the waters of the Pearl River Delta to become an IMO emissions control area (ECA),” she said. “We have already talked to the authorities in the central government and we are now continuing a dialogue with the authorities in Guangdong province,” Loh noted.
She acknowledged however that this vision may take a long time to reach fruition as there are obstacles at a very fundamental level since the current national policy in China is to go for onshore power options rather than fuel switching as an emissions control measure. Hong Kong has promoted fuel switching as the fastest and easiest way to get clean air, she added.
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