🛢 🚀 💵 Hiring US-to-China Oil Tanker Costs More Than Launching a Space Rocket

That journey costs about $80 million, compared with $74 million for a standard SpaceX Falcon 9 launch, shipbroker Gibson said this week. The same amount of money could have bought a near-identical tanker outright earlier this year.

The eye-watering prices are the result of a global tanker shortage that is getting worse with every additional barrel of oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. For weeks now, supertanker markets have been in the middle of a boom the likes of which industry veterans have never seen. Brokerage SSY says that, even after adjusting for inflation, rates are now the highest since the first supertankers hit the world’s oceans in the 1960s — surpassing the tanker wars of the 1980s, when Iran and Iraq attacked commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf.

“There’s really not quite enough shipping to go around,” Russell Hardy, chief executive officer of Vitol Group, the world’s biggest independent oil trader, said at a conference this week. “We’ve had pretty parabolic pricing.”

Iranian attacks that put ships out of service for repairs are tightening capacity further, while some vessels are adding thousands of miles to their journeys around Africa to avoid Houthi attacks.

“We’ve certainly seen extraordinary freight markets before, but the speed, magnitude and breadth of this rally are remarkable,” said Lauren Gallinari, head of business intelligence at shipbroker MJLF & Associates.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-09/the-global-oil-tanker-shortage-is-getting-worse-by-the-day

📎 Bloomberg