Surging Tanker Rates Signal Deepening Global Energy Crisis

By Weilun Soon (Bloomberg) — Global tanker freight rates are surging to record levels with little respite in sight, a sign of the growing strain in oil markets as traders, shipowners, producers and buyers grapple with a drawn-out conflict in the Persian Gulf and increasingly complex workarounds.

Earnings for supertankers sailing on the benchmark Middle East-to-China route are at a record of nearly $800,000 a day. Meanwhile, for the US Gulf to Asia run, charterers have been offered very large crude carriers at a record lump-sum fee of $29.5 million — close to $15 per barrel without considering additional war risks or fees for unexpected delays.

There is little sign of that momentum changing. Freight analysis from data intelligence firm Kpler suggests daily earnings for VLCCs will stay above $100,000 a day into next year, more than double historic levels that rarely went above $45,000. Two-year leasing rates for VLCCs could rise by 20% to 30%, according to a Morgan Stanley note published on Thursday.

“There’s quite a few bottlenecks all at the same time,” Alex Grant, Equinor ASA’s global head of crude, products and liquids trading, said on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Petroleum Conference by S&P Global Energy in Singapore. “The market is quite stressed with all of that, and that’s showing up in the shipping rates.”

Oil markets have surged this week after attacks resumed in Hormuz, with Brent racing past $100 a barrel for the first time since July as Washington strikes Iranian tankers and Tehran fires at an airbase, Navy ships and commercial vessels. Crude is up more than 40% since the war began.

But other metrics, including freight, are reacting far more sharply with no end in sight to the US war in Iran, at a time when Houthi militants are ramping up attacks and Ukrainian strikes are crimping Russian crude and product exports. US retail diesel prices have hit a record, along with diesel margins for refiners.

Freight, as measured by the Baltic Exchange’s tanker index that looks at VLCC daily earnings across different routes, has more than doubled over the course of the war to a peak.

“If I intend to move products from A to B, I first look at the shipping market. If it doesn’t make sense, I can’t move,” Max Tay, head of Asia for heavy products at Repsol SA, said at the Singapore conference. “I’m sort of enslaved to the freight market.”

Traders and shippers congregating this week said they expected longer workarounds and inefficient modes of delivery to continue. 

“The crude volume is there. What’s hampering it is the transit, what’s hampering it is the shipping,” said Manu Sehgal, vice president of strategy and feedstock supply at Indian refiner HPCL-Mittal Energy.

Since the start of the war, transits through the Strait of Hormuz — the vital chokepoint connecting some of the world’s largest oil and gas producers and global markets — have tumbled. Some risk-tolerant shipowners have continued to sail through, however, often keeping supply trickling out with a “shuttling” system that relies on waiting vessels in the Gulf of Oman.

That workaround has allowed barrels to flow — 10 million per day, according to the chief executive of oil trading giant Vitol Group this week — but vessels are limited compared to pre-war numbers, and prices are steep. The Baltic Exchange, which has begun publishing an index to cover the voyage from the Gulf of Oman to east Asia, estimates daily earnings on that route have spiked 85% since inception to reach almost $386,000 a day this week.

At the same time, Iran-backed Houthi militant group’s attacks on ships in the Red Sea and around the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint are forcing some supertankers to pick up Saudi crude from a Mediterranean export outlet instead. The subsequent journey to Asia now involves sailing through the Suez canal and around the African continent — adding more than three weeks and millions of dollars worth of cost to the journey, compared to a more direct route through the Gulf of Aden.

Another factor driving up miles and costs is Asia’s hunger for US crude, as consumers try to balance higher costs against lower risk.

“We have to accept that relatively higher logistics cost, because so many alternative routes will be necessary instead of the Middle East,” said Takeshi Hashimoto, chairman of major tanker owner Mitsui O.S.K. Lines. 

Middle East operators, meanwhile, are taking more of the situation into their own hands, adding to their fleets in order not to rely on commercially-owned ones. A senior executive at Kuwait Petroleum Corp. has said it was buying more ships, following the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co.’s recent buying spree.

© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

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