The freight rate index soared 50% in 50 days! The shortage of oil tankers intensified, and six newly built giant ships joined the “air drive to grab oil” ranks

The Zhitong Finance App notes that the shortage of tankers is getting worse, so much so that newly built ships that usually transport refined oil products during their first voyage are now speeding up to load crude oil as soon as possible.

According to Signal Ocean's ship tracking and chartering data, the six supertankers delivered this year went from East Asia Air Airlines to load crude oil to the Middle East, Africa, or the Americas without cargo on board. By contrast, there was only one such voyage last year.

Tanker owners who are about to receive new ships almost always use them to transport fuel such as gasoline during the first voyage and then load crude oil. This is both economically and geographically reasonable: first, refined oil products are cleaner than crude oil, and ships do not need to be cleaned after transporting them; second, many ships are built in East Asia, which imports large quantities of raw crude oil and exports refined oil products.

Now, a severe shortage of tankers is upending this logic. This year, both internal and external oil producers within OPEC increased production. At the same time, Western sanctions against Russia and the risk of crossing the Red Sea disrupted traditional routes, leading to longer voyages and the need to use more ships.

Smaller finished tankers have also been incorporated into the crude oil transportation trade, and some traders have to split cargo transportation due to lack of large vessels, which further increases transportation costs. The Baltic Dirty Tanker Index (Baltic Dirty Tanker Index), which tracks crude oil transportation rates on 12 major routes, has jumped 50% since the end of July.

“When very large crude oil carriers (VLCCs) make $100,000 a day and Suezmaxes (Suezmaxes) make $80,000 a day to transport crude oil, people would rather lock in these rates quickly to prevent them from disappearing,” said Georgios Sakellariou, a chartering analyst at Signal Maritime.

The “Aliakmon I” ship is the first supertanker to sail for the first time as an empty ship observed this year. It left a shipyard in northeastern China without cargo at the end of June and then went to Kuwait to load nearly 2 million barrels of oil. The ship, owned by Japanese trading company Mitsui & Co., then delivered crude oil to South Korea in late November.