More fuel types, more analysers: what shipping’s fuel shift means for measurement

Alternative shipping fuels is no longer a speculative niche.

According to Lloyd’s Register’s January 2026 review of Clarksons data, shipowners ordered 590 merchant and leisure vessels in 2025 that will be capable of operating on alternative fuels at delivery, totalling 45.5 million gross tonnes. 

LR says the total alternative-fuel-capable orderbook now stands at 1,942 ships, with LNG still dominant but methanol, LPG, hydrogen, ammonia, biofuel and even a small number of nuclear-capable vessels also in the mix.

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For analytical and process-monitoring suppliers, that matters because every extra fuel pathway creates a different measurement problem. A fleet built around conventional fuel oil could rely on a relatively familiar package of custody-transfer practice, fuel testing and safety systems. 

A fleet that increasingly spans LNG, methanol, ammonia, hydrogen and biofuel cannot. The commercial significance of shipping’s fuel shift is therefore not just propulsion choice; it is the rapid expansion of demand for bunker measurement, gas detection, leak monitoring, transfer assurance and onboard fuel-quality verification. 

That is especially true now that the orderbook is no longer concentrated in one “future fuel”, but spread across several competing ones.

LNG shows how quickly this can turn into a dedicated instrumentation market. ISO 11982:2025 sets out requirements and guidance for quantifying LNG as marine fuel on board LNG bunkering ships, and it applies not just to fossil LNG but also to biomethane and synthetic methane. 

The standard covers ship-to-ship transfer to LNG-fuelled ships, transfer between LNG bunkering ships, and transfer to or from shore tanks and other facilities. In other words, as low-emission gaseous fuels proliferate, measurement during bunkering is itself becoming more formalised and more equipment-dependent.

Methanol is pushing the same trend from a different direction. ISO 6583:2024 defines the general requirements and specifications for methanol, from all forms of production, at the point of custody transfer for use as marine fuel before any onboard treatment. 

At the same time, ISO/FDIS 22120 is advancing toward publication and sets requirements for methanol bunkering transfer systems and equipment, operational procedures, risk assessment, safety protection and personnel training. 

That combination matters because methanol is no longer just a decarbonisation talking point; it is becoming a fuel with an emerging technical framework for what has to be measured, controlled and handled safely during transfer.

Ammonia sharpens the safety side of the story even further. The newly approved ISO work item ISO/AWI 26201 covers the bunkering of ammonia-fuelled vessels and explicitly includes requirements on hazardous areas, safety zones, toxic areas or spaces, monitoring zones, emergency procedures and training. 

For process and analytical readers, that is the key point. Some alternative fuels create not just a quality-assurance challenge but a monitoring-intensive hazard environment in which toxic exposure detection, zoning and emergency response instrumentation become central to the fuel system rather than peripheral to it.

What makes this particularly significant for the petrochemical and alternative-fuels sector is that maritime decarbonisation is starting to look less like a single fuel transition and more like a distributed market for specialist monitoring. 

LNG bunkering needs robust quantity measurement. Methanol introduces custody-transfer and transfer-system requirements of its own. Ammonia brings acute toxicity and monitoring-zone issues. Hydrogen, where it appears, will come with its own purity and safety demands. 

That diversity means shipping’s fuel transition is also an instrumentation transition, one in which suppliers able to support fuel quality, transfer integrity and onboard safety across multiple fuel types may find a larger market than those tied too closely to one pathway.

So while the headline number is 590 vessels, the more useful figure for instrumentation readers may be the spread of fuel types behind it. The maritime sector is not moving neatly from one conventional fuel to one replacement. 

It is building a more fragmented fuel landscape, and fragmented fuel landscapes require more measurement, not less. For analytical and process-monitoring companies, that may be one of the clearest commercial signals in the entire alternative-fuels market.