Singapore refines and stores fuel on its doorstep and supplies its ports directly. Sri Lanka imports most of its fuel, which makes bunkering there dearer for ships than at established hubs. India is a fairer comparison, but Sri Lanka lags even there: S&P reckons its ports sold less than half as much bunker fuel as India’s in 2024.
Ships calling at Singapore took on 57 million tonnes of bunker fuel in 2025, according to the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA). The Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) has never published its bunker volumes; S&P Global Commodity Insights, which tracks fuel and shipping data, puts sales at Sri Lanka’s ports at just under 1m tonnes in 2024. To win more of this business, the industry says, the country needs more storage capacity.
Bunkering is simply refuelling ships. A bunker is a ship’s fuel tank, and bunker fuel is what fills it. Suppliers load ships from shore tanks through pipelines, or from barges, small tankers that carry fuel out to a ship at the quay or at anchor.
Fuel isn’t the only thing a ship buys in port. On the same call, it often takes on food, fresh water and spare parts, and has repairs done. The industry calls these ancillary services: business that clusters around a port’s main job of handling ships and cargo. However, fuel, or bunker sales, are a significant business at hub ports.
“Between 2023 and 2025, we have seen a growth of 75% in the bunkering volume,” said Zafir Hashim, president of the transportation and plantation sector at John Keells Holdings, speaking at the 2026 International Maritime & Logistics Conference (CIMC). A discussion on bunkering, ancillary services and investment included a panel representing fuel, shipping and ports to discuss how Sri Lanka measures up against rival ports.
“Colombo has grown by 72%, Hambantota by about 30%, and Trincomalee by over 100% in the last two years,” he said, attributing the rise to “disruptions in other locations”. Because the SLPA does not publish bunker volumes, these figures cannot be checked against official data.
The best independent estimate comes from S&P Global Commodity Insights, which reckons Sri Lanka’s ports sold just under 1m tonnes of bunker fuel in 2024, up on the previous year. India sold 2.25 million tonnes (Chart 01).
Another panellist, K. Raghu, managing director of Lanka IOC, put the gap with Singapore more starkly: Sri Lanka’s ports handle “some 140th of what Singapore is doing today”.
Hashim turned to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka for evidence of growth. “If you look at what the Central Bank reports, exports of [fuel] over the last five years have grown from around $377 million to $1 billion,” he said. “A large portion of these exports is from the bunkering industry.” (Fuel sold to foreign ships counts as an export.)
The bank’s figures broadly bear him out. Its External Sector Performance reports show earnings from “petroleum products” rose from $374 million in 2020 to $1 billion in 2024 (Chart 02). The December 2024 report credits higher bunkering volumes for the jump, noting that petroleum exports passed $1 billion for the first time.
Singapore Sets Scale
The MPA publishes its bunker volumes every year. Bunker volumes are the amount of fuel supplied to ships, counted in tonnes. They rose from about 43 million tonnes in 2013 to about 57 million in 2025, a rise of about a third (Chart 03).
The MPA breaks its sales down into 16 fuels. Twelve are variants of three conventional ones (marine fuel oil, marine gas oil and marine diesel oil) in different sulphur grades, each sold both neat and blended with biofuel. The other four are pure biodiesel, liquefied natural gas (LNG), methanol and ammonia. Chart 03 shows the yearly totals.
Singapore refines and stores fuel on its doorstep and supplies its ports directly. Sri Lanka imports most of its fuel, which makes bunkering there dearer for ships than at established hubs. India is a fairer comparison, but Sri Lanka lags even there: S&P reckons its ports sold less than half as much bunker fuel as India’s in 2024 (Chart 01).
Container Gap
Hashim compares Singapore against Rotterdam and Hong Kong, putting each port’s container traffic next to its bunker sales. Ports count containers in twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs): a 20-foot box counts as one, a 40-foot box as two. That lets ports and ships of different sizes be compared in a single unit. A port’s throughput is the number of TEUs it handles in a year.
“If you look at Singapore, they handled about 44 million TEUs last year, and they needed 56 million metric tonnes of bunker fuel,” he said. “But there is a difference, because Singapore is a real energy hub, so it is not all bunkers. Rotterdam has 14 million TEUs and 9 million tonnes of bunkers. Hong Kong handled about 13 million TEUs and has 5 million metric tonnes of bunkers.”
Singapore sells about 1.3 tonnes of bunker fuel for every TEU it handles, against roughly 0.6 in Rotterdam and 0.4 in Hong Kong. As Hashim conceded, Singapore’s role as an energy hub inflates its ratio.
Sri Lanka’s container volumes are rising but remain far below Singapore’s (Chart 04). According to the East Container Terminal, the port of Colombo should be able to handle 10 million TEUs a year by the end of 2026. That is around a quarter of what Singapore handled in 2025.
What the SLPA Reports
Although the SLPA does not disclose how much fuel its ports sold to ships, its annual reports show how much fuel tankers brought into the ports in five categories: liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), a group of gas oils, jet fuel, gasoline and kerosene, crude oil, fuel oil and base oil (Chart 05).
The first column is liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), the gas sold in cooking cylinders. The second column combines gas oil, a diesel-type fuel, with jet fuel, gasoline and kerosene. The third is crude oil, the raw oil that refineries turn into other fuels. The fourth is fuel oil, a heavy fuel that large ship engines, power plants and factory boilers burn. The fifth is base oil, the refined oil that makers mix into lubricants such as engine oil.
The reports contain no bunker figure. Fuel oil is the closest category, since large ship engines burn it, but the SLPA does not say how much of it went to ships.
They list “the supply of water, fuel and electricity to vessels” among the SLPA’s duties, but they draw no connection between that duty and the unloaded fuel.
Until 2021, the SLPA counted ships that called only at Colombo specifically for bunkering. Ships that called for another reason, such as unloading imports, loading exports or transhipment, and refuelling during the visit are not in that number (Chart 06).
“De Silva reckons fossil fuels still supply 85-90% of ships’ fuel, but he expects ammonia, methanol and biofuels to overtake them by 2050. Is Sri Lanka ready for that shift? Mr Hashim was candid. Ammonia, hydrogen and LNG cost far more to store and move than conventional fuels, he noted.”
Infrastructure First, Services Next
Hashim said Sri Lanka’s first need is storage for bunker fuel, connected by pipelines. Tanks without pipelines, he said, are like “building a beautiful house without a roof”. Mr Raghu called for better jetties, more berths and a fleet of barges, as well as deep-water jetties at Trincomalee for bigger ships. “Wherever infrastructure has been developed, we see business,” he said.
Thusitha De Silva, head of sales for commercial, industrial and exports at Chevron Lubricants Lanka, another panellist at the session, argued that bunkering captures “only a small portion of the value that is available to Sri Lanka”. Margins on fuel are thin, he said; the money lies in the services around a ship, such as oil testing, lubricants, crew training, environmental services and technical support.
Rounding out the panel, Captain Kumar Satnam Singh, chief operating officer of Subsea Global Solutions, which sells ship services in Asia and Europe, made the same case from the shipowner’s side. A ship earns $30,000-60,000 a day, he said, so a day lost to paperwork or customs costs more than cheap fuel saves. “A couple of dollars more per ton does not hurt the ship owner.”
Colombo, he argued, “is not aiming to be the bunkering hub; it is aiming to be a maritime services hub”. Shipowners want to do everything in one call. “I have to call one port for bunkers and another port for maintenance,” he said. “That is not efficient.”
The Future of Bunker Fuel
De Silva reckons fossil fuels still supply 85-90% of ships’ fuel, but he expects ammonia, methanol and biofuels to overtake them by 2050.
Is Sri Lanka ready for that shift? Mr Hashim was candid. Ammonia, hydrogen and LNG cost far more to store and move than conventional fuels, he noted. “Whether we are ready or not, honestly, I think we are kind of far away from that,” he said, “because we are still battling with this whole conventional world.”
Asked to name the one policy change they would make, De Silva and Raghu both called for certainty. Hashim wanted a plan first, drawn up jointly by government, business and banks.