Shipowners Place a $20 Billion Bet on Long-Haul Crude

Shipowners have ordered 217 supertankers in 2026, more than double the 93 booked in all of 2025, in a buying run worth over $20 billion. Signal Group, a shipping analytics firm, published those counts on 17 September. Allied Shipbroking, tracking the same market, logged 164 very large crude carriers against 83 a year earlier.

Each VLCC hauls about two million barrels and costs about $130 million to build, Allied said. The checks are clearing now. The ships will not.

Owners Have Already Booked 217 Supertankers

The 2026 total is the largest VLCC order wave in at least 25 years. It is also a wager on geography. Asian and European refiners have been replacing barrels that used to move through the Strait of Hormuz, which carried about one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas before the United States and Israel struck Iran on 28 February. Buyers have turned to the Atlantic basin, and those cargoes steam much farther.

THE 2026 VLCC ORDER WAVE

• Signal Group: 217 VLCCs ordered in 2026, against 93 in 2025.
• Allied Shipbroking: 164 VLCCs, against 83 a year earlier.
• Yard ticket: about $130 million per ship, Allied said.
• Old steel: about 20% of the VLCC fleet is more than 20 years old, Veson Nautical said.

Rebecca Galanopoulos, a senior analyst at Veson, tied the orders to that longer map, not to a one-month rate spike. Fleet age is the other argument owners use. Veson puts about 20% of VLCCs past 20 years, and Clarksons has said the average age is the highest since 1998. Replacement would be a fair story if the old ships were heading to the beach. They are not. Kpler, a cargo-tracking firm, still sees vintage hulls feeding the shadow fleet that moves sanctioned oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela.

We believe owners betting on increased long-haul shipments from the Atlantic to Asia are playing a large part in the renewed demand for VLCC ordering.

Rebecca Galanopoulos, senior analyst, Veson Nautical

Pavlos Fakinos, a freight analyst at Allied, said recent contracts already stretch to 2029 and 2030. That calendar is the bet. Owners are paying 2026 prices for hulls that will earn their keep after this war’s freight print has had years to fade.

The Benchmark VLCC Rate Crossed Seven Figures

On 18 September the AG-FE VLCC spot earning, the Gulf-to-China benchmark, printed $1,319,300 a day on the TradeWinds tanker screen, against a 2026 average of $422,500. Allied had already recorded VLCC spot hire above $500,000 a day, up from about $132,000 in February, before the war. Those are different series. The February number is Allied’s pre-war baseline. The seven-figure print is the mid-September Gulf-to-China screen.

Loading port now decides the payday. Ships that still work inside the Gulf command a war premium. Ships that load outside Hormuz, or on the US Gulf and West Africa runs to China, earn less and still earn a fortune by any older standard.

VLCC HIRE BY LOADING PORT

The Oman, West Africa and US Gulf prints come from Lloyd’s List’s 17 September tanker note. The one-year eco rate is TradeWinds’ 18 September assessment. Even the cheaper Atlantic runs are a long way from a normal year, and they still consume a lot of ship-days, because the old triangular patterns that kept the fleet efficient have broken down.

Broker Arrow put that inefficiency in plain language. Crude has been mostly long-haul for six months, the Arabian Gulf has been largely out of commission for ordinary fixing, and the fleet is burning more sea-days per delivered barrel than it did before the war. BRS has estimated that about 15% of the global VLCC fleet is already tied up, to some degree, in shuttle work around Hormuz. Ships wait. Ships lighter. Ships sit in the Gulf of Oman for a ship-to-ship transfer. That is how a barrel that used to ride one hull now occupies two.

The current freight system is very tonnage-inefficient, adding on to tightness in effective supply.

Arrow, tanker report, 15 September 2026

Asset prices have followed the spot market into strange territory. Pareto Securities told a Norway conference that a 10-year-old oil tanker now costs more than a new one. Braemar said it was the first time it had seen that inversion, valuing a 10-year-old VLCC close to $150 million. DHT, the New York-listed owner, fixed the 2016-built DHT Panther for three years at $100,000 a day from October, against a 2008 three-year average of $58,545. A 23-year-old VLCC, the 309,200-dwt Xi Xiu, changed hands for $62.25 million, more than double the just-under-$31 million it fetched early last year when it was named Loggam.

Time is what buyers are paying for. A new hull cannot load in October. A 10-year-old can.

Why the New Hulls Will Not Work Until 2028

About 83% of the VLCCs ordered in the first half of 2026 are slotted for delivery in 2028 and 2029, according to Maritime Strategies International. That is the core of the wager: owners are treating a war-time route map as a multi-year book of work, while the ships that will test that view are still plates in a Chinese dock.

MSI said first-half VLCC contracting reached 54.5 million deadweight tonnes, above the previous full-year record of 32.6 million dwt in 2006. The VLCC orderbook-to-fleet ratio, MSI said, was roughly 35%, up from 2% in 2023. Broker BRS’s summer delivery list had 60 VLCCs due in 2027, 127 in 2028, and 125 in 2029 and beyond. First-half ordering, MSI said, more than doubled the 2028 delivery stack on its own.

THE WAR CALENDAR BEHIND THE ORDERS

1. 28 February 2026: The United States and Israel strike Iran, and tanker traffic through Hormuz collapses toward a shuttle-and-transfer pattern.
2. April 2026: Drones cut the East-West pipeline by about 700,000 barrels a day; Saudi Arabia restores full flow within days.
3. January to June 2026: MSI records 54.5 million dwt of VLCC orders, with about 83% of that first-half book due in 2028 and 2029.
4. 10 September 2026: Drones launched from Iraq’s Maysan province hit the pipeline again; the 1,200-kilometer line, moving 4 to 5 million barrels a day, shuts.
5. 18 September 2026: The AG-FE VLCC spot earning prints $1,319,300 a day.

Clarksons, in a June count, already had 262 VLCCs on order, about 30% of the existing fleet, above the October 2008 peak that later flooded the market. That snapshot is older than Signal’s 217 figure for 2026 alone, and it includes ships ordered before this year. Both point the same way. The queue is long, and it is bunched.

Chinese slots are filled into 2029. Heisenberg Shipping, in a July working paper, put 57% of all vessels then on order for delivery after 2028, just as owners still cannot price the downside of a wrong fuel choice under delayed IMO net-zero carbon pricing rules. The hulls arriving in that window will meet a carbon bill and a freight bill at the same time. Only one of those is visible on today’s screen.

Dynacom, Capital and the Greek Checkbook

Western owners, mostly Greek, took about half of first-half VLCC orders, MSI analyst Jialin Xu said, with Asian owners about a quarter. BRS counted 72 Greek VLCCs on order against 47 for China, and said the Greeks could take the ownership crown as they offload old tonnage, often to Chinese buyers. China still holds 77 VLCCs of 20 years or more. About one-third of current Greek VLCC orders, BRS added, come from companies with little or no VLCC track record, so some of those ships could be resold before delivery.

Veson’s spring tally put Greek tanker newbuilding totals this year at $39.89 billion, about 61% of the $65.72 billion booked by the top five owning nations. China was second at $9.52 billion, then Singapore at $8.61 billion, Hong Kong at $5.13 billion and the United Kingdom at $5.08 billion. Those dollars are a late-May snapshot, not a 17 September close, but they show who wrote the early checks.

THE LARGEST SPRING ORDER BOOKS

• Dynacom Tankers: George Procopiou’s firm ordered 36 tankers worth $3.8 billion, Veson said in late May, double the next owner by value.
• Capital Maritime: Evangelos Marinakis’s group contracted 11 tankers worth $1.3 billion.
• Venergy Maritime: 14 tanker newbuilds worth $991 million.

The steel is Chinese. Xu said the five largest VLCC orders all went to Chinese yards, and about 89% of first-half contracts did too. Hengli Shipbuilding took 55% of China’s first-half orders, with Jiangsu New Hantong at 14% and Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Co at 11%. A November 2025 decision that paused port fees on Chinese-built ships had already pulled owners back to those docks after a year of staying away. Hengli, on the old STX Dalian site, now holds one of the world’s largest backlogs. Korea kept the high-value gas ships. China kept the VLCCs.

Atlantic Barrels Now Steam All the Way to Asia

The bet only pays if Atlantic crude keeps walking across oceans. Ioannis Papadimitriou, an analyst at Vortexa, said production on South America’s east coast, led by Brazil, Guyana and Argentina, could grow by about 2.5 million barrels a day through 2030, largely feeding Europe and Asia and favouring longer-haul trades on bigger ships. US barrels are already in that pipe.

The Energy Information Administration’s weekly U.S. crude export figures put loadings at 4.831 million barrels a day in the week ending 11 September, against 2.745 million barrels a day a year earlier, a 76% rise. Kpler had already logged a monthly record of 5.6 million barrels a day in May, helped by Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases and a jump in Gulf of Mexico grades. Some of that May pace was SPR oil that will not last. The structural piece is the voyage length. A US Gulf cargo to China occupies a VLCC for weeks that used to be a Gulf-to-Asia hop.

That is why a US Gulf-to-China earning of $388,417 a day still supports newbuild talk even though it sits well below the Gulf-of-Oman print. The Atlantic run uses the ship longer. Owners who order a 2029 hull are betting that this longer map outlives the shuttle premium at Hormuz. If the strait reopens in a hurry, the US Gulf and Brazil still have oil to sell. They may not still pay $1 million a day to move it.

Mid-September offered a small preview. Hormuz transits rose to a three-week high even as rates stayed elevated, a reminder that traffic and hire can decouple for a while and then snap back together. A ceasefire would hit the screen in days. It would not cancel a 2029 delivery slot.

Gulf Producers Are Staffing Their Own Shuttle Fleet

Independent owners are not the only people buying steel. Middle Eastern producers have found that many commercial owners will not run the strait under fire, so they are putting their own names on the stern. Lars Barstad, chief executive of Frontline, told a Norway conference that the damaged Saudi pipeline would force the kingdom deeper into that business, at least for a time.

Saudi (Arabia) will need to participate in this business to a much greater degree… at least temporarily

Lars Barstad, CEO, Frontline, Norway conference

Braemar calculates that national-oil-company VLCCs have carried about 24% of Middle East VLCC exports since the war began, against 12% in 2023. ADNOC has acquired six VLCCs since late July. If producers keep those fleets, more Gulf cargoes move off the spot market and the earnings ceiling for independent owners comes down, Braemar warned. The same shuttle system that is minting $1 million days is teaching Gulf states they can own the lightering leg themselves.

The pipeline is the other swing factor. The East-West line, 1,200 kilometers from the eastern fields to Yanbu on the Red Sea, had been moving 4 to 5 million barrels a day as a Hormuz bypass. Drones from Iraq hit pumping stations on 10 September. People familiar with the repair work said Saudi Aramco was aiming to restore about half the flow within days of 16 September, with full capacity in about six weeks. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on 15 September that crude should be moving again in days. Those were aims, not completion reports. An April strike on the same system had cut about 700,000 barrels a day and was repaired in days. This hit was larger.

Delivery in 2028 Collides With a Familiar Glut Risk

Shipping has seen this movie. The 2008 VLCC binge, which the June Clarksons orderbook already surpassed in headcount, arrived just as trade fell over, and rates spent years in the cellar. Breakwave Advisors, commenting during the spring Posidonia rush, said the orderbook was already above average and that a “meaningful negative balance” looked likely later on. MSI’s warning is more specific: the 2028 delivery wall is no longer a forecast, it is a slot list.

Morgan Stanley has argued the other way, that longer voyages, floating storage, an old fleet and the war could keep tankers tighter than tonne-mile demand beyond 2027. Both views can be true in sequence. 2026 and 2027 can stay tight because shuttles waste ships and because about 20% of the VLCC fleet is old. 2028 can still be oversupplied if 127 new VLCCs land on a route map that has shortened again.

The old ships make the downside worse, not better. A 23-year-old hull that just sold for $62.25 million is not being scrapped. Sanctioned trades will keep some of that steel at sea. Mainstream trades will then meet a wave of 2028-29 newbuilds plus a shadow fleet that never left. Owners who say they are only replacing age are adding to a fleet that refuses to shrink.

Arrow, summing up the September squeeze, said VLCC owners were living through a rare stack of scarce ships, wasted miles, thin inventories and Chinese buying, and that the ceiling had not been reached. It also said the setup was finite. A demand unwind or an Iran de-escalation both sit on the horizon. The 217 hulls on Signal’s pad, and the 164 on Allied’s, will still be on the pad if that horizon arrives early. The $20 billion is already committed. The 2028 earnings are not.