Shipping decarbonisation in Singapore

Due to its geographical location and strong infrastructure, Singapore has become one of the world’s most critical maritime nodes. As the world’s largest bunkering hub and one of its busiest for transshipment, shipping is connected to Singapore in many different ways.

As shipping moves towards its 2050 targets, understanding emissions across different parts of the sector, and how they are accounted for, can provide a useful starting point for tracking progress. Drawing from publicly available shipping data and T&E analysis, we explore the different ways emissions are linked to Singapore.

Situated along major East-west trade routes, Singapore hosts one of the world’s most concentrated mixes of bunkering and transshipment activity. Port throughput, vessel calls and bunker fuel sales illustrate the scale of Singapore's maritime activity, but the density of vessel traffic visible in its waters ultimately reflects an extraordinary concentration of shipping activity unmatched almost anywhere else in the world. 

Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) figures show the port handled roughly 85 containers every minute in 2025, with around 90% consisting of transshipment cargo. As a result, Singapore’s shipping emissions profile is driven predominantly by its role as a global transshipment and refuelling hub serving international shipping networks.

Bringing these milestones together helps place Singapore’s current position in context, showing how today’s decarbonisation efforts compare against where the IMO, EU and Singapore itself aim the sector to be by 2030, 2040 and 2050.

Emission estimates

The following presents estimates of emissions linked to Singapore’s maritime activity based on different approaches and datasets.

Information on scope, data and methodology used for the dashboard can be found in the methodological note.

As the world’s largest bunkering hub, Singapore provides a useful window into how marine fuel markets are evolving. This section explores the fuel transitions, regulatory shifts and emerging fuel pathways shaping the sector.

Multi-fuel transition

Fuel choice is becoming an increasingly important consideration in how quickly the sector decarbonises.

Alternative fuel growth is one of the closely watched indicators in shipping decarbonisation. Expanding rapidly from a low base, Singapore has been quick to respond to new fuel demand, led by LNG and biofuel blend bunkering. 

Under prevailing B24 and B30 blending specifications, roughly three-quarters of these volumes remain conventional fossil fuels. Available market information also suggests that much of the biofuel component supplied in Singapore is imported through regional supply chains. 

While Singapore is emerging as an orchestrator of evolving marine fuel pathways, much of the growth continues to rely on fossil fuel infrastructure.

Regulation compliance

Policy signals can trigger significant changes in long-standing industry practices.

The IMO 2020 sulfur cap provided a clear regulatory requirement for the shift from heavy fuel oil (HFO) toward very-low-sulfur fuel oil (VLSFO). Comparing bunker sales between 2019 and 2025 shows how quickly Singapore’s bunker market adjusted following the implementation of the regulation.

This shift provides evidence that regulation can be highly effective in changing market behaviour, which matters because the next wave of targets is coming.

Conclusion

Shipping is connected to Singapore in many different ways, and attempting to produce one emissions number could miss the point. Being able to explore the sector using different established accounting approaches can help us understand why these numbers look different depending on what we are trying to measure, especially in a place like Singapore. This also helps to show how progress is being made across different parts of Singapore’s maritime sector.