Day 2 - - Energy, Markets & the Business of Shipping
- John Lindquist - Director of Marine Development, Stabilis Solutions / President, Connecticut Maritime Association (CMA)
When a fifth of the world’s seaborne gas and a quarter of its seaborne oil are suddenly locked behind a single strait, the Gulf Coast stops being a regional export cluster and becomes the supplier of last resort. 2026 was the live test of that proposition, and the results were uneven: some terminals and traders had the best quarters in their history, while others discovered how little slack sits between a nominated cargo and a loaded one.
Where Day 1 treats the crisis as a security event, this session treats it as a commercial one. What happened to nominations, laycans, destination clauses and force majeure claims? Which contract structures held, and which failed on first contact? How much of the freight spike was scarcity and how much was fear, and how much of the re-routing is now permanent? You will leave with something more useful than a forecast: an honest account of what the Gulf Coast can and cannot do under sudden global call.
CMA Shipping has programmed crude and LNG for forty editions and has never once programmed gas liquids. That ends in the one city with no excuse for it. Fed by the Mont Belvieu hub, the Houston area loads more VLGCs than anywhere else on earth, and it is about to load more as Enterprise, Energy Transfer and Targa all add export capacity through 2026 and 2027.
The timing is delicate. VLGC owners have just posted record results, and roughly a hundred newbuilds are due by late 2028. The panel asks whether new dock capacity can absorb that fleet, what Panama transit limits mean for the US-to-Asia leg, how ethane and ammonia are being layered onto the same infrastructure, and where an owner should look for the next leg of demand. If you work in tankers or containers and have never had a reason to study this market, this is that reason.
- Senior Representative - Classification, ABS
- John Lindquist - Director of Marine Development, Stabilis Solutions / President, Connecticut Maritime Association (CMA)
Project 11 is the most ambitious upgrade the Houston Ship Channel has seen in a generation, widening and deepening the waterway through Galveston Bay so that larger ships can pass one another. It is also a bet that a busier waterway with bigger ships can be run as safely as the old one. Since the Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore, nobody in this room needs reminding what a single allision can do to a port, a supply chain and a balance sheet.
This session puts the engineers and the people on the bridge side by side. Where does the programme stand, and what has each completed segment changed in practice? How are pilot–master interface, passage planning and tug-escort standards evolving for bigger ships on a constrained channel? Where do the single points of failure sit today (bridges, bends, fog), and who carries the liability when something goes wrong?
A reality Houston must factor in: hurricanes. Between June and November a single storm, fog bank or terminal fire can shut the Channel for days, stranding ships, backing up refineries and rippling through freight markets from Rotterdam to Ningbo.
This session follows a closure from the inside: how the decision to close and reopen is actually taken, what a multi-day shutdown costs the people in this room, how insurance and business-interruption cover respond, and how terminals, owners and charterers write resilience into their contracts before the next storm rather than after it. It is practical and immediately relevant to anyone with cargo, ships or capital exposed to the Gulf.
The Americas reorganised their energy trade in 2026, and much of it ran through the US Gulf. After the change of government in Caracas, Venezuelan output climbed to around 1.25 million barrels a day, with more than half a million barrels a day heading to American refineries. Guyana keeps adding FPSOs, Argentina’s Vaca Muerta is heading for a million barrels a day as new export pipelines open, and Brazil has redirected crude towards Europe. Through all of this the US Gulf has supplied the great majority of Latin America’s imported diesel.
That diesel corridor is now a policy question as well as a commercial one. A 90-day US diesel export ban was floated in September 2026, and the USMCA, which Washington declined to extend in July, now faces annual reviews. This panel maps the new flows (heavy crude north, products south, light crude east) and asks what they mean for Aframax and Suezmax demand, for Gulf refinery runs, and for anyone pricing political risk on a trade that looked purely commercial a year ago.
The tanker session is a CMA fixture, and it has rarely been this dramatic. In September 2026 average VLCC earnings hit an all-time high of around $451,000 a day as Gulf exports were rerouted and a slice of the fleet sat idle off Oman, and a single US Gulf–China fixture cleared $37 million. Rates are being set by geopolitics and sanctions enforcement at least as much as by supply and demand.
The question for 2027 is whether that is the new baseline or a distortion about to unwind. The panel works through orderbook and yard slots against an ageing compliant fleet, scrapping decisions when a ship’s value depends on which market it may trade in, crude and product spreads pulling in opposite directions, and the compliance cost now built into every fixture. It is the same analysis the CMA audience has always relied on, this time from owners, brokers and charterers who fix out of the Gulf.
- Robert Elliot - Global Market Leader – Tankers, Bureau Veritas Marine & Offshore
The Maritime Action Plan, Executive Order 14269, expanded Title XI and the Section 301 fees on Chinese-linked ships add up to the most aggressive American intervention in commercial shipping in living memory. By the time you arrive in Houston, the suspension of those fees, due to lapse on 9 November 2026, will either have been extended again or will already be reshaping fleet deployment.
This session closes the gap between announcement and execution. Which incentives have produced steel, hulls and hires, and which have produced press releases? Who carries the cost if fees on foreign-built tonnage materialise, and how is that being priced into charters signed today? Can a domestic yard base, now with Korean capital in Philadelphia, scale to the ambition, or does the plan run into a workforce nobody has yet costed? Houston depends overwhelmingly on foreign-flag ships to move its cargo, so no port in the country has more riding on the answers.
Panama spent 2026 rehearsing a crisis it hopes not to repeat. The Canal Authority cut maximum draft step by step through the summer, to 47.5 feet by early September, as forecasters warned of a strong El Niño. Autumn rains then refilled the lakes enough to add transit slots. March 2027 falls in the middle of the dry season, which makes this the right moment to ask how much water there really is.
For the US Gulf the stakes are specific. VLGCs and LNG carriers bound for Asia, soybeans heading to China and Gulf diesel bound for Pacific-coast Latin America all depend on the canal or pay heavily to avoid it. The panel looks at reservation strategy, the economics of the Cape and Suez alternatives, the Authority’s long-term water projects, and how charterers are pricing Panama risk into 2027 contracts.
Shipping arrives at 2027 cash-rich after one of its strongest earnings runs on record, structurally short of compliant tonnage, and facing an asset-life decision it cannot defer much longer. Capital is available. Conviction is not.
The panel takes on the questions owners argue about in private. What do you order when no fuel pathway is settled and a newbuild will outlive the regulation that justified it? How are lenders and export credit agencies pricing sanctions and transition risk now that both have become real? Where has private credit displaced bank debt, at what cost and with what covenants? And is public-market appetite for shipping durable, or a product of the rate cycle? This is the traditional CMA money session, held in the city where much of the underlying cargo is produced, financed and sold.
- James Lightbourn - Chief Financial Officer, Ocean Atomics
- Bart B. Kelleher - President, Ardmore Shipping Services
Dry bulk has never had a home on a Houston-facing programme, and it should. US grain is back on the water to China after two years of trade war. By mid-September 2026 Chinese buyers had committed to almost 10 million tonnes of the new US soybean crop, with state buyers booking Gulf cargoes into early 2027. Meanwhile Capesize earnings ran above $40,000 a day through the summer on longer-haul ore and bauxite, with Guinea’s Simandou adding tonne-miles as it ramps up. Behind the rates sit the factors that decide whether a Gulf cargo moves at all: recurring Mississippi low water, Panama draft cuts, and a US–China trade truce that so far has been renewed rather than settled.
This panel takes the commercial view from the American end of the trade. Can the Gulf hold market share against Argentina and Brazil when freight to Asia from the Pacific Northwest costs less than half the Gulf rate? What does a strong El Niño do to Panamax and Kamsarmax economics if the canal tightens again in the 2027 dry season? How exposed is the sector to the next turn in tariff policy, and what does Houston’s own bulk trade in steel, petcoke and aggregates say about the US industrial cycle? Essential if you own, charter or finance bulkers with any exposure to the Americas.
- Dimitris Monioudis - Chairman – Technical Committee, Intertanko
Sanctions enforcement went physical in 2026. US forces boarded and seized tankers linked to Venezuela in the Caribbean and pursued others into the Indian Ocean, while the Gulf war turned war-risk cover from a routine renewal into a daily negotiation. For owners, charterers and their lenders the question is no longer whether a vessel is compliant on paper, but whether its history, ownership and trading pattern will stand up to a boarding party.
Drawing on Houston’s deep admiralty and energy-law bar, this session covers vessel arrest and seizure, OFAC and OFSI compliance in practice, sanctions clauses that work and those that don’t, and how war-risk and P&I markets are repricing exposure. Required listening for compliance officers, in-house counsel and anyone financing tonnage that changes hands.
The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 has been a fixture of CMA programmes for good reason. It is the backbone of US spill liability, and it still shapes how every ship trading here is insured, certificated and prepared for response. Houston is the port that would actually run a major response, which makes it the right place to test whether a framework written for oil after the Exxon Valdez is ready for what is moving on the water now.
The session covers the US legal regime and how it works with the response community, salvage readiness on a congested waterway, natural resource damage assessment and where the costs really land, and the unresolved question at the centre of it all: how a law written in 1990 applies to methanol, ammonia and LNG as cargoes and as fuels.
Houston is the gateway for the bulk of America’s waterborne plastic-resin exports. This multi-billion-dollar trade fills containers on routes the box sector counts but rarely explains. In 2026 it had its own Hormuz moment: with Middle East polymer exports bottled up, buyers from Asia to Latin America came looking for US resin, and then, as prices eased, some of that demand drifted back.
This deep dive connects two halves of Houston that are usually discussed separately: the container story Port Houston reports on, and the private-terminal petrochemical story it does not. It covers packaging and stuffing capacity, box availability and repositioning, tariff and anti-dumping exposure, and the demand outlook as global buyers diversify. It is a bridge session that only makes sense in Houston, and one of the strongest reasons for a container or logistics delegate to be in the room.
- Cassia Bomer Galvao, Ph.D., M.Sc. - Associate Professor | Department of Maritime Studies, College of Marine Sciences & Maritime Studies |Texas A&M University
- John Lindquist - Director of Marine Development, Stabilis Solutions / President, Connecticut Maritime Association (CMA)
Few topics generate less excitement and more fines. The Vessel Incidental Discharge Act is moving US discharge rules from the old EPA permit to a new framework enforced by the Coast Guard, and US and IMO standards do not line up neatly. Every foreign-flag ship calling in the Gulf has to get this right.
In thirty-five minutes this deep dive covers where the transition stands, what is changing for ballast-water management systems, greywater and other discharges, how enforcement is likely to work in practice, and the questions to put to your technical managers before your next US call. It is dry and unglamorous, and consistently one of the most practically useful sessions on any American maritime agenda.
- Jason Zuidema - Executive Director/ General Secretary, North American Maritime Ministry Association / International Christian Maritime Association