This morning we received a couple of direct messages via Twitter, asking us whether this story by Bloomberg about the amount of oil being shipped to China, is true. They host a chart showing a record number of (127) supertankers, and that part is true as our data query on supertankers also shows roughly the same. The issue however, is that their data query was too simple. They only factored in the 2-million barrel laden VLCC supertankers, and not the Suezmax (1 million) and Aframax (600-700K) tankers. Well, we didn’t want to deviate too much from their method, but did include all three classes, and fully laden. We did not include the partially-laden tankers nor the smaller sizes such as Panamax.

Please note that our query also only covers the vessels that are pinging over AIS, so you’ll definitely not see anything out of either Iran or Venezuela in such a query. Instead, we urge you to review our latest Export report (entire May 2020 will be published tomorrow). For Iran however, the vast majority of shipments do not have a destination, and that is because they are transshipped to other vessels which in turn deliver it to China as Malay blend. Venezuelan oil takes a long time to reach China as well, but it gets there eventually. It just takes a very long time for us to confirm, therefore we suggest you to review our February and March numbers.

Black= VLCC, Orange= Suezmax, Yellow= Aframax

And here’s what we have across 125 VLCC’s, 47 Suezmax and 32 Aframax tankers; a total of 204 tankers: