Demolition may be 'damp squib' for oil tankers, says Clarkson

Single-hull tanker demolition may fail to boost charter rates this year because most of the ships were already failing to find cargoes in 2009, Martin Stopford, managing director of Clarkson Research Services Ltd., said. Mono-hulled carriers secured 2.5 bookings per ship last year, down from about seven in 2004, Stopford wrote in a March 5 report on Clarkson's Web site. Over that period, 80 percent of single hulls were "scrapped, converted or marginalised in the charter market," he said.
Owners including Frontline Ltd., the world's biggest operator of supertankers, and Overseas Shipholding Group Inc., the largest U.S. owner of the vessels, have cited the elimination of single-hull tankers as being likely to buoy freight rates this year. Such vessels are due to face tougher trading restrictions this year under International Maritime Organization rules.
"The phase out of single-hull tankers has gone much faster than the declining fleet statistics suggest," Stopford wrote. "It means the 2010 phase-out effect could be a bit of a damp squib."
The Baltic Dirty Tanker Index, an overall measure of the cost of shipping crude oil, averaged 581 points in 2009, a decline of 62 percent from the year before, according to data from the London-based Baltic Exchange.
Clarkson Research is a unit of Clarkson PLC, the world's largest shipbroker.