The cost to use fuel tankers has skyrocketed since the EU ban, as ships enter the dark fleet and become unavailable — and uninsured by European maritime service providers — for regular trade routes, such as moving gasoline from Europe to New York.
First, a small armada of oil tankers emerged to help Russia beat sanctions. Now hundreds of fuel vessels are taking steps to hide where they’re going from prying eyes.
A record 311 mid-range ships were recently seen sailing without cargo or destination, according to Kpler data compiled by Bloomberg, compared to an average of 14 such ships at any given time prior to this year.
Meanwhile just 33 empty vessels are signaling Russia, the lowest level on record and down from 103 at the beginning of the year.
This shift is a sign that vessels may be forming a “dark fleet” to haul Russian fuel under the radar after the European Union banned it less than two weeks ago.
More than 400,000 barrels a day of diesel used to flow from Russia to Europe, and traders and shippers are expected to find workarounds to sanctions to keep a large portion of it flowing to the global market.
The jump in aimless empty vessels could also reflect shipowners trying to anticipate the region of highest demand in the reshuffling of Russian product.
The cost to use fuel tankers has skyrocketed since the EU ban, as ships enter the dark fleet and become unavailable — and uninsured by European maritime service providers — for regular trade routes, such as moving gasoline from Europe to New York.
Its Dubai address is listed on Equasis as the location for the commercial manager of most of Fractal’s tankers. The firm also recently moved out of a shared work space in Geneva — the home of its head office, according to a manager there.
Gatik’s fleet can haul about 30 million barrels of oil and fuels, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Fractal’s has a transportation capacity closer to 15 million barrels.
Almost all Fractal’s and Gatik’s tankers made calls to Russian ports this year, or took Russian cargoes by ship-to-ship transfer, according to tanker tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.
India and the United Arab Emirates did not sign up to the price cap, nor do they have other sanctions on Russian oil. They can legally use western services too, providing they give an attestation the cargoes were bought at or below the cap.
Russia-Serving
Gatik’s earliest recorded tanker acquisition was in June 2022, with its most recent in February this year, according to VesselsValue, a firm that monitors sale and purchase of merchant ships. Fractal’s was in the same month, Equasis data show.
One such example is the Gatik tanker Jumbo, which was observed calling at the port of Ust-Luga in Russia’s Baltic Sea on Feb. 11. It is now near Kalamata in Greece, a popular location for ship-to-ship cargo transfers of the nation’s oil, according to ship-tracking by Bloomberg. The ship came under Gatik’s management on Feb. 3, according to Equasis.
Russia exported about 3.2 million barrels a day of crude oil from its ports in the two months after the cap and Europe’s imports ban were imposed on Dec. 5, little changed from the prior two months. The two firms are part of the new supply chain network allowing that to happen.
Neither Gatik nor Fractal is listed as the beneficial owner of the tankers in their fleets, meaning they are probably operating the ships for others, whose identity is often not made public. They are described as the “registered owners” of their vessels on the American Club’s website.
This is a common form of vessel ownership in the shipping industry but does not denote the ship’s true owner.
Beneficial ownership is a more important detail for understanding who really owns the assets and, according to information from IHS, which maintains a shipping database for the International Maritime Organization.
“We’re seeing how easy it is to transfer ownership with these large, new groups,” Steve Cicala, co-director of the Project on the Economic Analysis of Regulation at the National Bureau of Economic Research.