Neptune Atlas

Tonnage

Tanker sizes

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Tankers are sorted into deadweight bands the way dry cargo ships are, and the sorting tells a broker less. A 110,000 tonne tanker may be an Aframax lifting fuel oil or an LR2 lifting jet fuel, and the cargo that suits one will not be allowed near the other. The bands are the vocabulary. The trade and the tanks decide the fixture.

The bands

These are the conventional names and the deadweight ranges the trade usually attaches to them. Every boundary here is a convention rather than a standard, and reports differ by several thousand tonnes on most of them.

ClassDeadweightWhat she carries
Handy / Coastalunder about 25,000 mt Short sea products, bunker delivery, edible oils. Small parcels into ports with restricted draught, which is usually the whole reason she is chosen.
MRabout 25,000 to 55,000 mt Medium Range. The workhorse clean product tanker: gasoline, gasoil, jet, naphtha, in coated tanks.
LR1about 55,000 to 80,000 mt Long Range 1. The same hull size as a dry Panamax, coated, carrying products on longer routes.
LR2about 80,000 to 120,000 mt Long Range 2. A coated Aframax. Clean products and naphtha over long distances.
Aframaxabout 80,000 to 120,000 mt Crude and dirty products in uncoated tanks. Identical tonnage to an LR2 and a different ship commercially.
Suezmaxabout 120,000 to 200,000 mt Crude, sized so she can transit the Suez Canal laden.
VLCCabout 200,000 to 320,000 mt Very Large Crude Carrier. Long haul crude between deepwater terminals and offshore moorings.
ULCCabove about 320,000 mt Ultra Large Crude Carrier. Rare. Her draught decides where she can go at all, and a good deal of the time the answer is nowhere near a berth.

Named for a canal, a strait or a rate sheet

Three of those names describe a ship. The rest describe something else entirely, and knowing which is which stops a broker treating them as a single scale.

MR, LR1 and LR2 come from the same commercial vocabulary as Aframax: they are rate-sheet brackets that hardened into names. VLCC and ULCC are the only ones that simply say how big she is.

Clean and dirty is the real dividing line

Dirty means crude oil, fuel oil, residuals and bitumen. Clean means refined products: gasoline, gasoil, jet, naphtha, and by extension the vegetable oils and easier chemicals. The distinction is not about cleanliness in any ordinary sense. It is about what the previous cargo leaves behind in the tank and whether the next charterer will accept it.

The physical difference is the tank surface. A crude carrier trades bare steel, coated against corrosion at most. A product tanker's cargo tanks are lined, commonly with epoxy or a zinc silicate, and that lining is what makes her acceptable for clean cargo. Different linings suit different cargoes: zinc silicate handles methanol and solvents but not acids, epoxy takes most clean petroleum products and vegetable oils, and the most aggressive chemicals want stainless steel tanks and a purpose-built parcel tanker.

So the coating is the ship's licence to carry clean cargo. It is also destructible. A coated MR that lifts a dirty cargo has to be cleaned back before she is acceptable in clean trade again, and that is real money: tank cleaning time, slops to dispose of, and days out of the market. Some coatings do not survive the cargo or the cleaning at all. Charterers ask for the last three cargoes precisely because the answer, not the class name, tells them what the tanks have been through.

Segregation, and how many grades she can carry at once

The other question that separates two tankers of the same size is how many parcels she can keep apart. That depends on the number of cargo tanks and, more importantly, on whether they have their own pumps and lines. A ship with a dozen tanks served by three pump rooms carries three grades fully segregated, not twelve. Charterers state segregation requirements in the enquiry, and a ship that cannot meet them is out regardless of her deadweight.

Chemical and parcel tankers add a further classification: IMO Type 1, 2 or 3 under the IBC Code, which describes how well the ship contains a cargo if she is damaged. Type 1 is for the most hazardous cargoes and demands the most protective tank arrangement. That is a containment standard, not a size, and it is a common source of confusion for anyone reading tanker records for the first time.

The hazard labels in AIS data are not size classes

Vessel type in AIS-derived records comes from a numbered table the ship transmits, and that table splits cargo ships and tankers by declared cargo hazard. So the type text arrives as things like Hazard A (Major), Hazard B and Hazard D (Recognisable). These read like grades of something and they are routinely mistaken for a size or quality ranking. They are neither. They describe what the ship says she is carrying.

2,427

Hulls in the register whose type is Cargo Hazard A (Major), with a mean deadweight of 71,323. That is a hazard declaration sitting in the same column as Tanker and Cargo, holding hulls of every size. Filter on type and it behaves as a class, which it is not.

The practical trap: a broker who filters type equals Tanker gets a clean, confident result and silently drops every hull that transmits a hazard-suffixed type instead. Those buckets contain real chemical and product tonnage. The fix is to treat the hazard labels as a second dimension, matched alongside the type rather than in place of it.

Why a deadweight filter mis-sorts tankers

The register holds 15,458 tankers. Of those, 13,540 carry a deadweight, and the rest cannot be returned by any band search at all, which is the same hole that swallows the 26,254 hulls across the whole register that have an IMO number and no deadweight recorded.

57,332

The mean deadweight of every tanker in the register. It lands squarely in the LR1 band and describes almost no real fixture. The tanker fleet is not distributed around its average, it is clustered at MR and again at the crude sizes.

Search 80,000 to 120,000 tonnes and the results contain crude Aframaxes and clean LR2s in one list, ships that share a hull size and share no cargoes. Search 45,000 and an MR product carrier sits beside a stainless steel chemical tanker whose day rate belongs to another market. Sort a coastal tanker into the Handy band and nothing in that band name says whether she is coated. In every case the tonnage was right and the ship was wrong.

Deadweight answers one question: whether she lifts the parcel. Coating, segregation and the last three cargoes answer whether anyone will let her load it. A tonnage list sorted on the first column alone will always show ships that cannot take the cargo and hide ships that can, and the broker who fixes is the one who reads the second column.

References

Dry bulk vessel sizesHandysize to Capesize: where the deadweight bands sit, why the boundaries are conventions, and how many hulls are in each. Reading a ship's particularsWhat each figure on a vessel description constrains, why GRT is a volume, and why draught excludes a ship long before deadweight does. Position list vs AIS vs port line-upThree things routinely confused in chartering: where a ship is, when she is free next, and what the port authority expects at the berth.

Neptune Atlas

Neptune Atlas holds 15,458 tankers with deadweight, type, flag and age, and searches them against the positions a desk has on file. Type labels are carried as the source wrote them, hazard buckets included, so a filter is built on what is actually in the record rather than on what a band name implies. Every paid plan starts with 7 free days. A card is needed to start them, and cancelling before they end costs nothing.

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