In the first seven months of this year, bonded liquefied natural gas (LNG) bunkering at Yantian Port surged by 161.4%.

Since the start of the year, Shenzhen has made remarkable progress in developing an international ship fuel bunkering hub. The bonded fuel bunkering business at the eastern Yantian Port area has grown rapidly, while the western port area successfully carried out its first trial LNG bunkering operation, steadily enhancing the international competitiveness of Shenzhen’s ports.

Customs data show Yantian handled 434,000 tonnes of bonded ship fuel in the first seven months of the year, up 40.7% year on year. Bonded fuel oil accounted for 300,000 tonnes (up 16.7%), while bonded LNG reached 134,000 tonnes — a striking 161.4% increase compared with the same period last year. Over the same period, Yantian processed 9.073 million TEUs of container throughput.

To further boost efficiency and capacity, Yantian is accelerating construction of its goal of becoming Asia’s leading bonded marine fuel bunkering center.

Key measures include a regulatory model of “centralized inbound inspection and outbound verification by tank batch,” which has cut customs clearance time per inspection batch by about 80%.

Digital upgrades are also speeding operations. A one-stop information platform enables parallel approval processing and faster responses to enterprise requests, reducing average bunkering time per vessel from 18 hours to 10 hours and placing Yantian among China’s most efficient ports.