Kandla pioneers methanol bunkering in India

A west-coast port runs the country's first shore-to-ship green-fuel bunkering trial, opening a route to decarbonising shipping.

What happened

• Deendayal Port Authority (Kandla) conducted India's first trial shore-to-ship methanol bunkering operation on 2 April 2026 — supplying methanol as marine fuel directly to a vessel from shore tanks.
• The port was independently assessed by DNV Maritime Advisory Services and rated Level 6 on the IAPH Port Readiness Level (PRL) scale for methanol bunkering.
• Trial partners: Stolt Tankers, J M Baxi, Aegis Vopak and Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. (IOCL), alongside the Port Authority; verification by DNV.
• The move is framed around the maritime sector's goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, focusing on low-carbon alternative fuels — e-methanol and e-ammonia.
• Target: ensure ~500 KTPA of RFNBO-compliant e-methanol by 2028–29 for deep-sea dual-fuel vessels on the Asia–Europe corridor. The next phase is ship-to-ship methanol bunkering.
• Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal said the milestone shows India's resolve to help lead the global shift toward green shipping.

Background & context

"Bunkering" is the maritime word for fuelling a ship — historically the filling of a vessel's bunkers with fuel oil. "Green" or "alternative-fuel" bunkering extends that act to low-carbon marine fuels that cut the lifecycle carbon of the fuel burned at sea. International shipping moves roughly four-fifths of world trade by volume and, because it has long run on heavy fuel oil, it is one of the harder sectors to decarbonise. The push at Kandla sits inside that larger problem: a port can only attract green-fuelled ships if it can physically and safely supply the new fuels, so the bunkering capability has to be built before the fuel demand arrives.

The global target driving this is the International Maritime Organization (IMO) — the United Nations specialised agency that regulates shipping — and its strategy to reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions from international shipping by or around 2050, with interim checkpoints along the way. To meet it, the industry is shifting from conventional fuel oil toward a basket of alternatives: methanol, ammonia, hydrogen, liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a transition fuel, and biofuels. Methanol is attractive because it is liquid at ordinary temperatures and pressures, is already traded and stored worldwide, and a growing class of newbuild "dual-fuel" ships can burn it. Its climate value, however, depends entirely on how it is made.

Kandla's advantage is that it did not start from zero. The port long handled conventional ("grey") methanol as a bulk cargo and therefore already had compatible infrastructure — tank storage, pipelines and jetties — that could be repurposed for fuelling ships rather than only landing methanol as freight. To convert that into a recognised bunkering capability it engaged DNV, an international classification and assurance society, to evaluate readiness against the International Association of Ports and Harbors (IAPH) Port Readiness Level framework, and then ran a live trial to demonstrate the transfer in practice.

The administering chain runs through the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways at the Union level. Deendayal Port — historically and still popularly called Kandla Port, on the Gulf of Kutch in Gujarat — is one of India's major ports, governed by a Port Authority constituted under the Major Port Authorities Act, 2021, which replaced the older trust-based governance of major ports with board-run authorities holding greater functional and financial autonomy. The renaming to "Deendayal Port" and the shift from "Port Trust" to "Port Authority" are why the same port appears under more than one name in official documents.

The IAPH Port Readiness Level scale itself is worth understanding because it is the yardstick this announcement leans on. The International Association of Ports and Harbors is a global federation of port authorities, and its PRL framework was designed to give a common, staged vocabulary for how far a port has progressed toward supplying a particular new bunker fuel. The lower bands cover intent, internal assessment and feasibility study; the middle bands cover regulatory clearance, safety guidelines and the ability to run controlled trials; and the upper bands cover demonstrated operations and routine, commercial-scale supply. A Level 6 rating therefore signals that Kandla has moved past paper readiness into the zone of approved, trial-capable operations — which is precisely what the 2 April shore-to-ship demonstration was meant to evidence. The point of an external grading is that the claim is independently legible to shipping lines deciding where to refuel, rather than being a self-assessment.

This single port action also sits within a wider Indian maritime-greening agenda. The country's long-horizon maritime planning has set out an ambition to develop green-fuel bunkering hubs and to convert select ports toward renewable energy and lower-emission operations, and India has been positioning specific ports as candidate green hydrogen and green ammonia hubs as part of the National Green Hydrogen Mission. Methanol bunkering at Kandla is one practical, near-term expression of that direction: rather than waiting for an entirely new green-ammonia supply chain to mature, it uses a fuel and infrastructure that already exist to put a demonstrable capability on the water now, while ammonia readiness is built in parallel.

For Prelims

• Entity: Methanol bunkering = supplying methanol as a low-carbon marine fuel to a ship; the act of fuelling a vessel is "bunkering."
• First in India: Deendayal (Kandla) Port — first Indian port to conduct a methanol bunkering trial (shore-to-ship, 2 April 2026).
• Location: Gulf of Kutch, Gujarat (west coast); a major port under the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways.
• Assessment scale: rated PRL Level 6 on the IAPH Port Readiness Level scale for methanol bunkering — an International Association of Ports and Harbors framework that grades how prepared a port is to supply a new marine fuel, from early intent through to full commercial readiness. Higher level = greater operational readiness.
• Assurance: readiness evaluated and the trial verified by DNV (an international classification society).
• Trial partners: Stolt Tankers · J M Baxi · Aegis Vopak · Indian Oil Corporation (IOCL) · Deendayal Port Authority.
• Fuel quality target: ~500 KTPA (kilo-tonnes per annum) of RFNBO-compliant e-methanol by 2028–29. RFNBO = Renewable Fuels of Non-Biological Origin — fuels made from renewable electricity (e.g. green hydrogen combined with captured CO₂), an EU classification that "e-methanol" must meet to count as genuinely renewable.
• Corridor & ships: aimed at deep-sea dual-fuel vessels on the Asia–Europe route; next phase is ship-to-ship bunkering.
• Driving goal: the maritime sector's net-zero-by-2050 ambition (IMO trajectory); shortlisted low-carbon fuels here are e-methanol and e-ammonia.
• The alternative-marine-fuel set (for "how many / which of these" questions): methanol · ammonia · hydrogen · LNG (transition fuel) · biofuels — against the conventional baseline of heavy fuel oil / marine diesel.
• Methanol colour ladder: grey methanol (from fossil natural gas/coal, the traditional cargo) → blue methanol (fossil source with carbon capture) → e-methanol / green methanol (green hydrogen + captured CO₂, near carbon-neutral). Only the renewable grades deliver real decarbonisation.

Why it matters

The problem this addresses is a chicken-and-egg deadlock in shipping decarbonisation: shipping lines hesitate to order green-fuel vessels if no port can refuel them, while ports hesitate to invest in supply if no ships demand the fuel. A port that builds and certifies bunkering capability ahead of demand breaks that loop and positions itself on the trade routes of the future. For India — which is investing heavily in port capacity and coastal logistics — being early on a green-fuel corridor is a competitive lever, not only an environmental one, because the Asia–Europe trade is exactly where dual-fuel deep-sea vessels are concentrating.

It also converts an existing strength into a new market. Because Kandla already had methanol storage, pipelines and jetties for the cargo trade, the marginal cost of becoming a methanol bunkering hub is lower than building from scratch — a sequencing advantage that few ports start with. The RFNBO target ties the ambition to a credible quality standard rather than to grey methanol that would offer little climate benefit, which matters for honesty: the decarbonisation claim only holds if the methanol supplied is genuinely renewable. Finally, it slots India into the IMO's net-zero trajectory with a demonstrated, third-party-verified capability rather than a statement of intent, which is the kind of concrete, datable milestone that distinguishes a real transition from a press announcement.

For Mains