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LONDON—The cost of shipping Middle East crude to Asia,
the world’s busiest route for supertankers, may advance
a seventh day as owners await an increase in March
cargoes and demand for smaller vessels rises.
Bookings
of very large crude carriers, or VLCCs, that haul 2
million barrels of crude, typically climb in the middle
of each month when refineries are told when to arrange
for ships to call at ports in Saudi Arabia and other
oil-producing countries. Greater demand for smaller
suezmax carriers is also stopping shippers from
splitting cargoes in two, Nikos Varvaropoulos, a tanker
broker at Optima Shipbrokers Ltd. in
Athens,
said Thursday.
“The
VLCCs are stable, and more suezmax cargoes are coming
into the market from West Africa” and the Middle East,
Varvaropoulos said in an e-mailed note. There is a
“slight upward trend” in VLCC-rental rates, he said.
S-Oil
Corp., controlled by Saudi Aramco, hired a vessel owned
by the National Iranian Tanker Co. for 115 Worldscale
points, according to Optima. That’s 0.5 percent above
the London-based Baltic Exchange’s benchmark assessment
of 114.38 points for voyages to Asia.
Suezmaxes normally transport about 1 million barrels of
crude and traders sometimes prefer the ships because
they can enter a wider range of ports than VLCCs.
Suezmaxes can also navigate
Egypt’s
Suez Canal fully loaded whereas VLCCs must empty part of
their cargoes into an adjacent pipeline so that they
don’t lie too low in the water.
Worldscale points are a percentage of a nominal rate, or
flat rate, for more than 320,000 specific routes. Flat
rates for every voyage, quoted in US dollars a ton, are
revised annually by the Worldscale Association in London
to reflect changing fuel costs, port tariffs and
exchange rates.
Each
flat-rate assessment gives owners and oil companies a
starting point for negotiating hire rates without having
to calculate the value of each deal from scratch.
At
114.38 Worldscale points, owners of double-hulled VLCCs
can earn about $80,567 a day on a 39-day roundtrip from
Saudi Arabia to South Korea, based on a formula by R.S.
Platou, an Oslo-based shipbroker, and Bloomberg
marine-fuel prices.
Frontline Ltd., the world’s biggest VLCC operator, said
February 15 it needs $31,400 a day to break even on its
supertankers.
Bookings
for VLCCs sailing from the Middle East to Asia account
for 47 percent of global demand for the carriers,
according to New York-based McQuilling Brokerage
Partners Llp. Shipments to the US and Caribbean, the
second-biggest market, account for 14 percent of demand
for supertankers. (Bloomberg) |
