StocExpo 2026 Rotterdam: Recap & Key Industry Takeaways

StocExpo 2026 closed its doors at Rotterdam Ahoy on 11 March, drawing an estimated 5,000 visitors and up to 500 exhibitors across two days of conference sessions, live technical demonstrations, and the industry’s most-watched awards ceremony. Under the theme Fuelling Global Collaboration, this year’s edition signalled a storage sector grappling with competing pressures: energy transition timelines, ageing infrastructure, and the accelerating role of digital operations.

StocExpo 2026: What Happened in Rotterdam

Organised by Easyfairs UK Ltd, StocExpo has run annually since 2005 and is widely regarded as the leading trade event for the bulk liquid storage industry. The 2026 edition at Rotterdam Ahoy expanded its footprint with four dedicated conference streams — future fuels (co-located with the NH3 Event), safety, digitalisation, and the FETSA CEO Stage — running in parallel across both days.

A notable addition for 2026 was the introduction of EEMUA CPD-accredited certification workshops, held each morning before the main conference floor opened. These structured, assessed sessions gave attending engineers and HSE professionals a formal qualification pathway — a first for the event and a direct response to industry demand for verified competency development within a trade show format.

The expanded Sprint Robotics Drones & Robotics Zone drew consistent crowds, with live demonstrations of autonomous inspection systems operating in simulated tank environments. For terminal operators under increasing pressure to reduce confined space entries and improve inspection turnaround, the zone offered practical proof-of-concept rather than vendor presentations alone.

FETSA CEO Stage and Speaker Highlights

The FETSA CEO Stage provided the event’s most senior industry perspective. Adrian Lenning, CEO of Odfjell, appeared on the panel — bringing direct operational insight from one of the sector’s largest chemical tanker and terminal operators. His participation continued Odfjell’s visible presence in industry dialogue around terminal decarbonisation and fleet strategy; for more on the company’s operations, see the Odfjell Terminals profile.

Mariam Kantaria of BP addressed the intersection of future fuels and digital transition, covering how major energy companies are rethinking storage infrastructure roles as ammonia, methanol, and hydrogen move from pilot to commercial scale. Marcel van den Eijnden of Evos Group focused on IT/OT convergence and connected operations — one of the most operationally immediate topics for terminal operators managing legacy systems alongside new digital layers.

On safety, Peter Savage of Aquarius Energy and Jeroen Brouwer contributed to sessions covering future fuels safety protocols, with particular attention to the specific hazard profiles of ammonia handling at scale — a topic gaining urgency as NH3 terminal projects advance across Northwest Europe.

Future Fuels: Rotterdam’s Ongoing Strategic Role

The co-location of the NH3 Event within StocExpo 2026 reflected Rotterdam’s positioning as the primary European gateway for alternative fuel infrastructure. The port’s operators are actively investing in ammonia, hydrogen, and biofuel-compatible terminal capacity, and the conference sessions translated those capital programmes into technical and commercial discussion.

This aligns with broader infrastructure trends covered in our analysis of Rotterdam’s tank storage future fuels blueprint, where the convergence of new terminal investment and regulatory pressure is reshaping how the port functions within European supply chains. StocExpo 2026 gave those trends a live forum — and in several cases, gave them named company commitments.

The digitalisation stream ran adjacent to these future fuels discussions, reinforcing that the two transitions are not separate workstreams. Autonomous operations, predictive maintenance, and IT/OT integration are increasingly prerequisites for terminals handling new energy products safely and at required throughput. The pace of deployment in this area was also a central theme in the Aramco and Yokogawa autonomous control project at Fadhili — a benchmark increasingly referenced in European terminal circles.

LBC Terminal Tour and Tank Storage Awards

A limited-capacity terminal tour of LBC Tank Terminals’ Rotterdam facility ran alongside the main event, offering registered delegates direct access to one of the port’s largest independent bulk liquid operators. Places were not guaranteed on registration and were allocated separately — a format that underscored both the operational sensitivity of active terminal access and the strong demand from engineers and project managers for facility-level insight. For background on LBC’s global storage network, see the LBC Tank Terminals profile.

The Tank Storage Awards returned as the social centrepiece of the two-day programme, recognising performance across safety, innovation, sustainability, and individual contribution. The awards function as an industry benchmark — shortlists are tracked internally by companies as validation of capital programmes and operational improvements made over the preceding year.

StocExpo 2026: What It Means for the Storage Sector

Taken together, StocExpo 2026 reflected a sector that is operationally stable but strategically unsettled. The core business of bulk liquid storage continues to generate consistent revenue, but the direction of the next decade — which fuels, which infrastructure standards, which digital frameworks — remains contested. The event’s four-stream structure acknowledged that directly: there is no single answer, and the industry is working through it in parallel.

The EEMUA CPD workshops and the expanded robotics zone both pointed toward a sector increasingly investing in technical competency and autonomous capability, rather than deferring those transitions. For those who attended, StocExpo 2026 offered a clearer picture of where the leading operators are actually placing bets — not just where they say they are.

StocExpo is expected to return to Rotterdam in March 2027. For a broader view of major industry events across the year, see the global oil and gas events guide for March 2026. The next major liquid terminal event on the calendar is ILTA 2026 in Houston, taking place later in the year.