Image: Suez Canal Authority
CMA CGM’s decision to be an early mover in LNG bunkering, amid the decarbonisation push, has paid dividends, according to the French carrier’s VP for bunkering and energy transition, Farid Trad.
At last week’s Singapore International Bunkering Conference and Exhibition (SIBCON), he recalled that In 2017, CMA CGM signed the first of a few 10-year agreements under which compatriot energy major TotalEnergies supplied 300,000 tons of LNG annually to the carrier in Rotterdam.
Deliveries commenced in 2020, using an LNG bunkering vessel commissioned by Mitsui OSK Lines for long-term charter to TotalEnergies.
Mr Trad said: “When you look at what is happening 10 years later, you can’t help but say what we have achieved is enormous. We went through the Ukraine crisis in 2022 after Covid, and now we have another geopolitical event in the Middle East. What’s certain is that any future strategy will be a combination of security of supply, decarbonisation, and competitiveness. Finding the holy grail will be around those three dimensions.”
In July 2025, CMA CGM and TotalEnergies announced a new 50:50 joint-venture for LNG bunkering logistics in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp region, expanding their long-term cooperation and scaling supply up to 360,000 tons annually through 2040.
In conjunction with SIBCON, CMA CGM announced it would work with Singapore LNG Corp, which operates the LNG terminals, and the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, to develop liquefied bio-methane as a marine fuel at the world’s largest bunkering port by sales volumes.
By going upstream and operating its own LNG bunkering barges, Mr Trad said, the French shipping line was assured of fuel for its LNG dual-fuelled ships.
CMA CGM, the third-largest shipping line with a fleet of nearly 4.5m teu, has 157 containerships of 1.6m teu on order, all to run on LNG dual-fuel.
Explaining CMA CGM’s choice of LNG, Mr Trad said the gas reduced health hazards due to lower sulphur oxide and nitrogen oxide emissions.
Alluding to uncertainty in environmental regulations, he added: “To invest in the long run, we need some certainty on regulation, which is lacking today. Discussions are still ongoing at IMO. We are still waiting to see how it will all fit together.
“When we order a ship, we order it for 25 years. So we always need to have a longer view on where we’re standing and you have to go through different crises, ups and downs, [fuel] prices could be up, prices could be down.”
He said CMA CGM saw agility and pre-deployment as key success factors, given the repeated supply chain shocks since 2020.
“The key critical point is not the potential demand, but the ability of the network of LNG bunker barges to be wherever we require them in terms of agility.
“One of the key things is that redeployment and agility is one of the key factors to managing the container shipping fleet. So we need to be able to change trading patterns as quickly as possible. And for that, we need bunker barges to be available in all ports when we possibly need them. Not only in huge bunker hubs like Rotterdam, Shanghai, and Singapore, but there are other ports that are either secondary or less important.”