A new World Bank regional report on East Asia and the Pacific’s maritime sector delivers an uncomfortable message for anyone tracking the pace of shipping’s energy transition. Production of the fuels the industry is betting on remains a small fraction of the demand that vessels already capable of using them could generate.
The report, ‘Ports, Ships, and Fuels’, frames efficiency, safety and sustainability as interdependent pillars of the region’s maritime future, but its sustainability findings are the most striking from an energy transition standpoint. East Asia and the Pacific accounts for roughly 40-50% of global bunker fuel consumption; yet, in 2025 more than 99% of that fuel was still conventional. The gap between stated ambition and fuel availability is the report’s central warning.
The supply shortfall, fuel by fuel
For green methanol, announced project capacity totals 18.5 million tonnes, but only a fraction of that is currently in production and, as a base chemical, it has other competing markets. Green ammonia faces a similar constraint: shipping is not the only buyer. Industry already consumes over 200 million tonnes of ammonia annually, most of it used in fertiliser production, and because ammonia represents a smaller share of final product value in fertiliser production than in shipping fuel, the chemical industry can simply outbid vessel operators for the green supply that does come online. Biodiesel, meanwhile, competes directly with sustainable aviation fuel for the same feedstock, and airlines are generally willing to pay a higher premium than shipowners.
The scale of investment required to close these gaps is enormous: the report estimates global maritime fuel infrastructure could need around $310 billion for green ammonia, $81 billion for green methanol and $42 billion for renewable LNG by 2040. Against that backdrop, fossil LNG remains the default alternative fuel by a wide margin with approximately 470 LNG-fuelled ships already in service globally, and more than 400 on order, although a large proportion of that count reflects LNG carriers running on boil-off gas rather than dedicated bunkering demand.
Safety risk rises as the fuel mix diversifies
The report is unusually direct in linking the fuel transition to safety risk, rather than treating them as separate workstreams. Alternative fuels introduce hazards such as fire, explosion and toxic release that conventional bunker fuel does not, and the report notes that a toxic ammonia release would be far more dangerous than a conventional fuel spill of a similar scale. In 2024 alone, seven shipping incidents were reported in the Singapore Straits. Three of these involved fuel releases, which is a salutary reminder that even the risk posed by conventional fuel is far from solved in one of the world’s busiest waterways, let alone the added complexity ammonia or methanol bunkering would introduce.
The workforce dimension: a region that supplies the world’s crews
East Asia and the Pacific isn’t just a testbed for new fuels; it is the source of much of the world’s seafaring workforce. The region supplies more than 40% of the world’s seafarers, with the Philippines alone providing around 13% of officers and ratings crewing international voyages. Training standards set across the region therefore shape crew competence on ships trading globally.
The report’s findings are blunt in that this workforce isn’t yet ready for the fuel transition at scale. Bunkering crews, engineers and emergency responders will need more technically demanding skills than conventional fuels require, and training and certification standards for LNG, methanol and ammonia are still being built, largely by frontrunners such as Singapore and Hong Kong.
Beneath these frontrunners, the report flags a widening gap in some domestic and inter-island fleets that are often decades old, under-regulated, and weakly enforced even on conventional-fuel safety, many lacking modern safety equipment. Layering alternative-fuel complexity on that base before those gaps close is exactly the scenario the report warns against and continued investment in seafarer competence is, in its framing, inseparable from the fuel transition itself.
A three-tier framework, with fuel-readiness reserved for the top
The report avoids a one-size-fits-all roadmap and instead sets out a graduated “no-regret” framework calibrated to what each country can absorb.
Tier 1 (Foundational) covers universal, low-cost actions every East Asia and Pacific country can take now: enforcing conventional fuel-quality standards and starting to build alternative-fuel training and emergency-response capacity, as Hong Kong and Singapore have already done, even before any alternative-fuel vessel arrives.
Tier 2 (Enabling) is for countries with growing trade and institutional capacity to modernise: designated LNG, methanol or hydrogen bunkering zones physically separated from cargo operations, dedicated safety-monitoring units, and contained pilots such as Thailand’s electric ferries or Japan’s hydrogen fuel-cell trials.
Tier 3 (Next-generation) is reserved for genuine frontrunners pursuing large-scale alternative-fuel infrastructure: Singapore’s 2027 methanol/ammonia bunkering push and its Rotterdam green corridor as well as pooled multi-country efforts like the Pacific Blue Shipping Partnership, where five Pacific nations combined resources toward a 40% emissions cut by 2030. The framework’s underlying argument is sequencing: skipping to Tier 3 fuel infrastructure without Tier 1 workforce and safety foundations in place means building the riskiest part of the transition on the least stable base.
The takeaway for energy transition
The report’s core message echoes a pattern now familiar across the maritime decarbonisation: vessel technology is arriving faster than the fuel supply chains needed to run it. Until that imbalance closes, early movers on alternative fuels risk becoming, in the report’s words, ‘stranded’ rather than pioneering.
