Bunker supply fears ease as the market adjusts to prolonged Hormuz disruption

The marine fuel supply squeeze set off by the conflict around the Strait of Hormuz has eased, with the market settling into a longer period of disruption, industry figures told the Asia Pacific Petroleum Conference (APPEC) in Singapore this week.

Rishi Nyati, managing director of Emarat Maritime, told a conference panel that sourcing bunkers and getting them on board is no longer a problem. The major hubs, he said, are not short of marine fuel in the way they were in March and April, even though prices have stayed high.

Price data for Singapore, the world's largest bunkering port, illustrates the scale of the move: outright VLSFO went from $433.50/mt at the start of January to $878.50/mt last Friday, a rise of more than 100%. Prices have swung sharply since strikes on Iran in late February, climbing through March before easing back from their peaks.

Max Tay, Asia heavy product trading manager at Repsol, said on the same panel that disruption around the strait has not gone away, but alternative sources of supply are still there. The harder problem now, in his view, is securing enough of the right blending components to make fuel that meets each buyer's and each market's specifications. He estimated that the Fujairah refuelling hub in the United Arab Emirates is running at roughly 40% of its pre-conflict bunkering activity.

Oil is still moving through the strait, Nyati said, with between 10 and 15 cargo vessel transits a day in both directions through the Omani corridor on the southern side.

The change of tone is striking against the start of the year, when the industry's main worry was weak VLSFO prices and thin margins. By April, IBIA's outgoing and incoming chairmen were warning that price reactions to the conflict were being overstated, and in June Mercuria still saw scope for regional stock-outs and hub outages.

Demand, meanwhile, has held up. Singapore's bunker sales over the first seven months of 2026 reached 32.58 million mt, more than 3% ahead of the same period in 2025 — itself a record year for the port. Sustained buying at that pace is the real test of how much slack is left in the system, even with the worst of the squeeze behind it.

For charterers and shipowners, the practical takeaway is that availability is no longer the binding constraint; specification and price are. Blue Ocean Chartering will keep tracking hub-by-hub availability and quality as the disruption runs on.

This report is a summary of reporting first published by Ship & Bunker, which covers the marine fuels and bunkering industry.