Most discussions about decarbonizing shipping still begin in the wrong place: can vessels run on carbon-neutral fuels, and can those fuels be produced and delivered? From where I sit, running one of India’s largest ports, those questions are increasingly settled. Dual-fuel ships exist and are on order, the fuels can be produced, and ports such as Kandla are demonstrating that they can be handled safely.

The hard part is no longer the ship or the molecule. It is the system that must form around them: the demand to justify investment, the collaboration to share risk, and above all the regulatory certainty that tells an investor a project will still make sense in ten years’ time.

India’s maritime sector is being transformed under two national roadmaps, Maritime India Vision 2030 and Maritime Amrit Kaal Vision 2047, aimed at building capacity, efficiency and sustainability, with ports at the center of all three. Alongside the conventional build-out of berths, deeper channels, storage, digitalization through NLP-Marine and electrification, a more consequential shift is under way. Under the National Green Hydrogen Mission, India intends to become a global hub for producing, using and exporting green hydrogen, green ammonia and green methanol, and major ports are being developed as integrated energy hubs: not just places where cargo moves, but where green fuels are produced, stored and bunkered. That is a significant change in what a port is for.

At Kandla we have taken that literally, positioning the port as an integrated green hydrogen hub for production, storage, export and bunkering. Industry is expected to invest around US$20 billion in production facilities on port land over the next decade, and we are building the plug-and-play infrastructure to match, from a 150 million liters per day desalination plant to renewable power connections to the grid.      We have also moved from intent to demonstration. In February 2026 we completed a shore-to-ship methanol bunkering trial, achieved Port Readiness Level 6 under the IAPH-DNV framework, and are progressing towards Level 7 alongside ship-to-ship capability.

We were the first port in the country to commission a one megawatt green hydrogen demonstration plant, now scaling to ten, and our first green tug, under the Green Tug Transition Programme, should be operational by November 2026.     “Port readiness” is often reduced to steel and tankage, but it also means regulatory preparedness, safety systems, procedures and a skilled workforce. Here Kandla has an advantage: we have handled methanol as a cargo for many years, so the ecosystem to manage the molecule already exists. Our task has been to redesign existing systems to treat methanol as a bunker fuel rather than freight. The ports likely to move fastest may be those that already handle these molecules as cargo: repurposing is quicker than rebuilding.      The result is counter intuitive. At a well-prepared port, physical readiness is now running ahead of the system meant to support it. We can bunker. What we are waiting on sits elsewhere.

The first external factor is demand. Shipping will be one of the main demand centers for green fuels, but on its own it will not be enough. A commercially sustainable ecosystem needs demand from several sectors at once – fertilizers, refineries, steel, power and heavy mobility – which gives producers the scale and confidence to invest in production, storage and distribution.

India’s early cost position shows what scale can do. We start from a genuine advantage: abundant renewable energy, competitive power tariffs, a growing manufacturing base and a clear policy framework, strengthened by the Strategic Interventions for Green Hydrogen Transition (SIGHT) scheme. The recent green ammonia procurement by the Solar Energy Corporation of India is instructive: aggregating demand across fertilizer plants through long-term contracts created the scale to improve bankability, lower financing costs and deliver very competitive pricing. As production scales, costs should fall further, lowering the delivered cost of these fuels.   None of this happens through a single actor. Government provides policy and incentives, industry brings technology and capital, and ports provide land, utilities and shared infrastructure. Structured this way, risk is shared and investors gain confidence.

Which brings me to the real bottleneck. The challenges are usually summarized as affordability, availability and acceptability. The hardest to provide, and the most important, is certainty: the industry needs long-term clarity over what qualifies as green, how lifecycle emissions are assessed and whether a fuel recognized in one market will be accepted in another.

At present it does not have that. The divergence between the European Union’s regulations and the IMO’s proposed Net Zero Framework creates uncertainty over the viability of commercial-scale green fuel production, and that uncertainty is what holds back final investment decisions. Policy measures that place a compliance burden on vessels running conventional fuels would help close the cost gap, but even where a port is ready to bunker, the binding constraint is sourcing fuel that qualifies as green under RFNBO rules at the volumes ships require. You can pass every readiness level and still be unable to bank the project, because the target keeps moving.   Kandla’s response is to commit anyway, but specifically. Given the order pipeline of methanol dual-fuel vessels and their expected deployment on East Asia to Europe green corridors, we are developing e-methanol production, storage and bunkering for ships on the Singapore to Rotterdam trade lane. The tankage, pipelines and protocols are already in place; our focus now is sourcing e-methanol that meets RFNBO criteria. We have removed every variable we can control and are left holding the ones we cannot: definition, regulation, and the certainty that follows.

The fundamentals are strong. India can become a global leader in green hydrogen and its derivatives, and ports like Kandla will be pivotal in connecting that production to global markets. As green fuels scale, new trade corridors will form around production and bunkering hubs, and a well-placed west coast port is positioned to become a significant gateway. This is as much a story about energy security and investment as about emissions.

But it will not be delivered by any one port, country or company. A net zero maritime economy needs coordinated effort from governments, ports, shipping, fuel producers and financiers, resting on a stable regulatory framework, investment, skills and collaboration.    The encouraging part is how much of that is already underway. The frustrating part is that the one thing the system needs most costs almost nothing to build. Ports such as Kandla can build the tanks, pipelines, power connections and operating capability. What only governments and regulators can provide is the long-term certainty that turns readiness into commitment.