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The Baltic Exchange published its weekly tanker report on Friday, September 11, and two lines of it sit a few rows apart. TD19 is an 80,000 tonne crude cargo loading at Ceyhan and discharging at Lavera. The Baltic assessed it at just over $115,200 a day. TC15 is an 80,000 tonne clean product cargo loading in the Mediterranean and running east through Suez. The Baltic assessed it at just under $38,000 a day. Same parcel size, same load area, same publisher, same day. The crude cargo paid three times the clean one. And the vessels are the same vessels. Drewry describes the 80,000 to 120,000 deadweight band as the Aframax in crude and the LR2 in product tankers, and calls the LR2 an Aframax with coated tanks, set apart only by the lining and the cargo separation that let it load diesel, gasoline, jet fuel and naphtha. The LR2 is the largest clean product class the Baltic prices. A coated one can do both jobs. A plain Aframax cannot take diesel without a conversion Drewry calls commercially unattractive. So the traffic runs one way, and it ran hard. Gibson Shipbrokers put approximately 52.5 percent of the coated LR2 fleet into dirty trades by the latter half of April. Signal Ocean counted as many as 68 LR2s crossing from clean to dirty in the first four months of the year, against 49 in all of 2025. TORM’s chief executive told investors on August 26 that the number of LR2s open to clean cargo had fallen by about 70 between January and the end of July, net of new deliveries, and that usable clean capacity was down roughly 5 percent even as the fleet grew. All of it happened while the world ran out of diesel. American pump diesel, a retail price including tax, reached $6.285 a gallon on September 14, up $2.546 in 12 months against $1.151 for gasoline. The International Energy Agency has the product itself above $200 a barrel in the United States, 94 percent above pre war levels. And here is what a shortage is supposed to do. It is supposed to pull carriers toward the scarce cargo. This one pushed them away, because a refinery that is not running produces no cargo at all.
📋 In This Issue:
⚖️ The Story:
What the Baltic printed on September 11, why an LR2 and an Aframax are the same hull, where more than half the coated fleet went, the five houses that measured it, why a diesel shortage destroyed diesel cargo instead of creating it, why the route pairs and the rate indices disagree and the tank cleaning bill that keeps the door shut
📊 By The Numbers:
The three times gap on one Baltic page, the clean route assessed below zero for three straight weeks, the 52.5 percent, the 68 against 49, the 71 vessel net loss against nearly 100 deliveries and the 27 percent availability hole
🌍 Why It Matters:
What it changes for the product tanker owner deciding whether to switch, the charterer trying to move a diesel cargo this winter, the refiner banking record margins and anyone who assumed a shortage lifts the people who carry the thing
👀 What To Watch:
Whether the migration unwinds, whether TC2 climbs back above zero, what the third quarter coverage numbers say, whether the refining side moves at all and the falsifier that would break this brief
🚨 Gosships Signal:
A shortage that destroys production destroys cargo. The carriers went where the cargo was
