Maritime Trade and Transport - HWWI

The result: Peak Oil will ultimately threaten the existence of oil tanker shipping. As tankers
have a service life of 25 years, anticipated development is taken into account in capacity
planning. The number of oil tankers is likely to gradually taper, and the service life of existing
ships will be stretched to the limit. Construction activity will collapse, as new vessels will only
be required to replace phased-out ships. Large tankers will be more seriously affected than small
ones, since they are subjected to greater capacity utilization risks, their focus is solely on crude
oil transport, and new propulsion technologies are likely to be implemented initially in the
high-consumption industrialized countries. For smaller ships, this may have a positive effect at
first. Since the construction of new (transit) pipelines will prove to no longer be profitable,
they will be used to a greater extent to fulfill distribution functions.
Tankers will be used for the most part at short notice on the spot market. In the more recent
past, a trend toward longer time charter contracts has been observed for larger tankers, and
increasingly for smaller ones as well. Deterioration in capacity utilization will first impact the
spot market.
Oil products and chemicals tankers
A typical product tanker can transport a variety of oil products (diesel, kerosene, gasoline, etc.),
so that charter rates are less likely to be impacted by fluctuations in oil prices. Products tankers
are primarily in the medium size segments (panamax, handy size), reach the aframax class at
most, and are generally rented short- and medium-term. With full order books concentrating
on large products tankers, the fleet capacity and average size are likely to increase appreciably
in the next three years. This means that a weaker market situation can be expected mediumterm
in this segment. China (31%) has now assumed leadership in the construction of products
tankers, followed closely by Japan. 35
We consider the long-term prospects to be somewhat positive, since seaborne trade with oil
products could grow more quickly than crude oil trade, a contrast with the past, and the major
consumers (USA, China) will be increasingly dependent on imports.
In recent years, the refinery capacities of the industrialized countries have hardly been expanded
or modernized for the processing of heavy oils, whose share in oil production will surge.
At the same time, the oil exporting countries in the Middle East want to begin expanding local
refining operations, to increase their share of the added value. This shifts the focus to the transport
of finished products to the importing country. Since in the future the use of crude oil will
be concentrated more strongly on the transport sector, the demand for products tankers is expected
to rise at the expense of crude oil tankers.
Products tankers will also suffer under the long-term drop in conventional oil production,
albeit not to the extent expected for the pure crude oil tanker segment. Whereas biomass is
like ly to be converted into fuel especially close to the place where it will be consumed, this only
35 See ISL Bremen (2006a).
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