The current situation
I started with the overall fleet picture of 4,181 ships and 93.5 million dwt. This fleet can be broken down in many ways.
Commercial operators
A recent survey we made identified 2,343 ships and 62.2 million dwt as being controlled by 112 commercial operators – each of which will control a fleet of a minimum of 10 ships after new ships are delivered.
The fleet sizes vary from Stolt Tankers with 99 existing ships totalling 2.35 million dwt plus 10 ships on order, down to fleets with currently eight ships and about 60,000 dwt or a Japanese operator with 16 ships but only 28,420 dwt.
The remaining 1,850 ships totalling 32.1 million dwt are controlled by countless companies, each with fewer than 10 ships. Every company has its own ideas as to how to run its ships. The companies decide on an area of trade, a type of cargo, or just go where the next good cargo takes them.
The ships
Over the last few years, there have been changes in the type of ships being built. Due to the need for IMO Class ships to carry vegetable oils, there are many of the larger 35,000-50,000 dwt ships delivered with IMO Class.
Some of these are delivered with IMO 2 Class that enables them to lift vegetable oils without obtaining any dispensation; others are delivered with IMO 3 Class but are later changed to IMO 2. Of course, many retain IMO 3 status as they only expect to carry IMO 2 cargoes on rare occasions, often only on their maiden voyages.
The volumes of chemicals moving in bulk are also increasing with methanol, caustic soda and various aromatic chemicals increasing their parcel sizes, especially from the Middle East Gulf and, to a lesser extent, the US Gulf.
As can be seen from Table 1, the rate of deliveries overall escalated from 2006, and indeed earlier, and peaked in 2008. This was partly due to ships being ordered in advance of the 2007 deadline for IMO Class changes and partly due to speculators, hoping to profit from the good conditions prevailing in 2005-2007. The latter reason was contributed to by a rapid expansion in the number of yards in China.
The peak was reached in 2008 just when the world economies crashed, making the situation far worse. In fact, a large number of ships ordered were never built and several of the new Chinese shipyards closed. By 2011, the number of ships and tonnage delivered were already below that of 2006.
The low point in deliveries was reached in 2013, and the rate is climbing again. I would expect to see it flatten now for some time. Figures 1 and 2 clearly show, though, that the amount in both numbers and tonnage delivered each year is still decreasing for the smaller sizes, but it is increasing for the larger sizes above 30,000 dwt.
It is interesting to see the number of all the ships still sailing that were delivered in the years preceding 2006 (Table 2).
Ships, especially chemical tankers, are built to have a long life; they are expensive to build and therefore need to last in order to make them economically viable. When predicting the future fleet, we use 30 years as the average age for scrapping. However many ships are scrapped or leave the chemical tanker fleet before reaching 30 years.
There are still 76 ships sailing that are older than 30 years; of these, 67 are below 10,000 dwt and the largest four of the remaining nine ships are American-flagged vessels that only trade on the coast of the US. Many of the smaller, older ships also trade domestically in various countries. This means that the existing fleet is very young and thus will not reduce in size much, certainly until the ships built in the last century reach retirement age.
