Supply
The continued severity of the market conditions has made owners dig deep into the oversupply of capacity. BIMCO now expects 19m DWT of crude oil tanker capacity to be demolished – up from 13m DWT in May – and 2.5m DWT of oil product tanker capacity is to leave the fleet, up from 1.5m DWT in May.
During the first six months of 2018, 13.1m DWT of crude oil tanker capacity has been demolished, a level equal to the total for the preceding 40 months. A change in that trend now seems to have developed, however, as only one VLCC was broken up in July, and little more that 1m DWT was taken away in total. BIMCO expects that there will be a cooling in demolition activity in the final six months of 2018, as the market is likely to deliver somewhat higher freight rates on the back of increased demand in the second half of the year.
Although scrap steel prices are high right now, returning about USD 17m to a VLCC owner when scrapping, this isn’t the deciding factor – freight rates and earnings are.
The slowdown in demolition interest appeared among oil product tankers one month earlier, and no oil product tankers left the fleet in June. BIMCO expects to see the 2017 demolition total exceeded soon and that 2018 will reach a six-year-high level of oil product tanker demolitions, despite the pace of it slowing down recently. During the first seven months, 1.8m DWT of oil product tanker capacity has left the fleet.
Fleet growth year to date has been muted by the massive demolition activity. The crude oil tanker fleet was 0.2% smaller by early August than it was at the start of the year. The oil product tanker fleet has grown 1.7% in the first seven months of 2018.
Our fleet growth forecast for the full year of 2018 is at 0.8% for the crude oil sector and 2.4% for the oil products sector.
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