Supertankers racing empty to load oil points to ship crunch

A shortage of oil tankers is becoming so acute that newly built vessels, which usually carry refined fuels on their maiden voyages, are instead racing empty to pick up crude as soon as possible.

Six supertankers that were delivered this year have travelled without cargoes from East Asia to load crude in the Middle East, Africa or the Americas, ship-tracking and fixtures data reviewed by Bloomberg and Signal Ocean show. That compares with just one such journey last year.

The Atrebates was delivered in early November. It sailed empty from China to the Middle East to pick up a crude cargo from Iraq, and is now headed for Gibraltar.

Tanker owners about to receive new ships almost always use them to carry fuels like gasoline on their maiden voyages to pick up crude. This makes both economic and geographical sense, given that oil products are cleaner than crude and the vessels won’t need to be washed after carrying them, and also because many of the ships are built in East Asia, which imports a lot of unprocessed oil and exports refined fuels.

A severe shortage of tankers is now upending that logic. Oil producers — both within and outside OPEC — have ramped up output this year. Western sanctions on Russia and the risk of traveling through the Red Sea, meanwhile, have disrupted traditional routes, resulting in longer voyages and more ships being used.

Smaller product tankers have also been drawn into the oil trade, while some traders have had to break up cargoes due to the lack of larger vessels, pushing up transport costs even further. The Baltic Dirty Tanker Index, which tracks rates to carry crude oil on 12 major routes, has jumped more than 50% since the end of July, while the Baltic Clean Tanker Index only rose 12%.

“When very large crude carriers earn $100,000 per day, and Suezmaxes at $80,000, to transport crude, people would rather just rush to lock those levels in, in case they go away,” said Georgios Sakellariou, a chartering analyst at Signal Maritime, a vessel-pool management company in the same group as Signal Ocean.

The Aliakmon I was the first such observed supertanker to make an empty maiden voyage this year. It left a shipyard in northeastern China without a cargo in late June, then headed to Kuwait to pick up nearly 2 million barrels of oil. The ship then delivered the crude to Vietnam in August.

© 2025 Bloomberg

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