BHP Vice President of Maritime and Supply Chain Excellence Rashpal Bhatti has been named 69th in the latest edition of Lloyd’s List’s One Hundred People, an annual assessment of the most influential people in the global shipping industry.

He had previously appeared in the top 100 list in 2022 and 2017.

BHP is one of the world’s largest dry bulk charterers, moving about 300 million tonnes of iron ore, coal and copper over 1,500 voyages in 2022.

Lloyd’s List’s report noted while the zero-carbon revolution overshadowed almost every strategic decision this year, the 2023 cohort has also had to “sustain some semblance of business as usual” – carrying 12 billion tonnes of annual seaborne trade through war zones and economic uncertainty.

In a separate write-up on Rashpal, the report said that the work undertaken by Rashpal’s division in freight logistics to help support the acceleration of decarbonisation initiatives in the shipping industry and drive efficiency in shipping has “an outsized impact on the typically fragmented dry bulk sector”.

Among the work highlighted by Lloyd’s List is BHP’s work with classification society DNV on a digitalisation initiative that enables timely and accurate greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reporting, management and insights from BHP’s chartered vessels.

Other initiatives BHP has recently rolled include an expression-of-interest tender for ammonia-fuelled vessels, with the intention that these would be used between iron ore ports in Western Australia and China. Through the tender, BHP aims to help put the world’s-first dry bulk vessels with the potential to radically reduce GHG emissions from shipping on the water within this decade.

This new, ambitious step comes on the back of the launch of all five of the BHP-chartered Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) fuelled Newcastlemax vessels, currently transporting cargo on the same route, and the first marine biofuel trial involving an ocean-going vessel bunkered in Singapore.

This work helps support BHP’s broader climate change targets and goals for shipping, which can be found here.

For Rashpal, who has been with BHP for 20 years and spent his career entirely in the commodities space, the work continues. “I’ve loved every minute of it,” he said.