A surplus of supertankers competing to load 2 million-barrel cargoes of Middle East crude oil expanded for the first time in four weeks, undermining owners’ efforts to secure better hire rates.
There are 15 percent more very large crude carriers, or VLCCs, for hire over the next 30 days than there are cargoes, according to the median estimate of seven shipbrokers and owners surveyed by Bloomberg News today. A week ago the excess was 10 percent.
Freight rates declined 0.8 percent to 49.57 Worldscale points today on the benchmark Saudi Arabia-to-Japan route, according to the Baltic Exchange in London. Rental income slid 7.6 percent to $14,978 a day, according to the bourse.
There is “ample supply of tonnage, affording charterers a good selection of vessels at reasonable rates,” Fearnley Consultants A/S said in an e-mailed report today.
The transportation capacity of the combined fleet of VLCCs and smaller aframax and suezmax tankers will expand 6.9 percent to 344.2 million deadweight tons in 2011, according to data from Clarkson Research Services Ltd., a unit of the world’s largest shipbroker. That would be more than four times the 1.6 percent climb in global oil demand to 88.8 million barrels a day this year predicted by the International Energy Agency.
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 U.S. dollars a metric 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.
The Baltic Dirty Tanker Index, a wider measure of crude oil transportation costs, fell 2.6 percent to 820 points, according to the Baltic Exchange.