A tanker’s size class is shorthand for everything a charterer needs to price it: how much cargo it lifts, which canals and terminals it fits, and which trade it was built for. The classes run from Medium Range product carriers near 40,000 deadweight tons up to Ultra Large Crude Carriers above 320,000, and the names are not arbitrary. Three of them come from a freight scale Shell built in 1954, one is named for the Suez Canal’s laden draught limit, and the two largest are named for what they are: very large and ultra large. This article walks the classes smallest to largest, gives the deadweight band each is known by, names the trade and the defining constraint, and shows where the name came from. The companion crude oil tanker CII calculator and product and chemical tanker CII calculator carry these class sizes into a carbon-intensity rating, and the freight that the spot market pays each class is tracked by the tanker indices covered in Baltic Dry Index and freight indices.
One caution before the bands: these are market conventions, not legal definitions. Deadweight (dwt) is the mass of cargo, bunkers, stores, and crew a ship can carry at its load line, and the class boundaries between, say, an LR2 and an Aframax sit a few thousand tonnes apart and overlap. A broker fixing a ship cares about the exact deadweight, draught, and tank coating on the vessel’s particulars, not the label. The labels are a sorting language for the market, and the rest of this article treats them as that.
How tanker classes are named: AFRA, canals, and capacity
Tanker classes get their names from three different logics, and knowing which logic produced a name tells you what the name actually constrains. The product-tanker classes (GP, MR, LR1, LR2) and the Aframax label come from a freight scale. Suezmax, Panamax, and the historical Malaccamax come from a waterway’s physical limit. VLCC and ULCC come from raw capacity. Mixing the three is the most common confusion in the subject, so it is worth separating them at the start.
The freight-scale names trace to the Average Freight Rate Assessment, or AFRA. Royal Dutch Shell created AFRA in 1954 to standardize how tanker shipping costs were stated in contracts, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration records that it is overseen today by the London Tanker Brokers’ Panel, an independent group of shipping brokers. AFRA sorts tankers into deadweight bands and assigns each band a freight assessment, so that a contract could reference “AFRA for the Medium Range band” rather than negotiate a rate from scratch. The bands themselves, General Purpose, Medium Range, Long Range 1, Long Range 2, became the everyday names for the ships that fall in them. Aframax, the band above LR2, is literally AFRA plus max: the largest vessel on the original AFRA scale.
The canal names work differently. A Suezmax is not a freight band; it is the largest ship that can transit the Suez Canal in a laden condition, and the class exists because that physical limit is a hard commercial fact for the crude trade out of the Middle East and West Africa into Europe and the US. The constraint is a draught-versus-beam relationship the Suez Canal Authority publishes in its Rules of Navigation, not a deadweight number, which is why the Suezmax deadweight figure is approximate and drifts as the canal is deepened. Panamax (named for the original Panama Canal locks) governs some product tankers the same way, and the deepening of both canals over the decades has moved these limits more than once.
Capacity names are the bluntest. A Very Large Crude Carrier and an Ultra Large Crude Carrier are named for size alone, with no freight scale and no single waterway behind them. They emerged as the crude trade scaled up in the 1960s and the oil majors chased the economics of moving two and then three million barrels in one hull. Their defining constraint is not a canal but draught: a fully laden VLCC or ULCC draws too much water for the Suez Canal laden and for most of the world’s ports, which dictates how and where they load and discharge.
Product tankers: clean cargoes in coated tanks
Product tankers carry refined petroleum products: gasoline, naphtha, jet fuel and kerosene, gasoil and diesel, and at the heavier end fuel oil and some chemicals. The defining feature is the cargo tank. A product tanker’s tanks are internally coated, with epoxy or zinc-silicate paint, or built in stainless steel on the most demanding chemical carriers, so the ship can clean thoroughly between grades and carry cargoes that bare steel would taint or that would corrode the steel. That coating is what separates a “clean” product tanker from a “dirty” tanker carrying crude or residual fuel in uncoated tanks. The cleaner the trade, the more rigorous the tank cleaning between cargoes, which is part of why product-tanker voyages carry cleaning time a crude voyage does not. The clean side of the market is tracked by the Baltic Clean Tanker Index, the BCTI, described in Baltic Dry Index and freight indices. The general construction and trade of these ships is covered in oil tanker, and the stricter chemical-carrier rules in chemical tanker.
Where a product tanker also carries noxious liquid chemicals, it falls under the IMO’s IBC Code, the International Code for the Construction and Equipment of Ships carrying Dangerous Chemicals in Bulk. The IBC Code sorts chemical tankers into three ship types by the severity of the cargo hazard. A type 1 ship carries the products of greatest environmental and safety hazard and needs the maximum protective measures, including the most cargo-tank separation from the shell. A type 2 ship carries appreciably hazardous products with significant protective measures, and a type 3 ship carries the least hazardous of the listed products with the least demanding construction. The cargo’s MARPOL Annex II pollution category (X, Y, or Z, in decreasing order of harm) drives the discharge rules. So a product tanker’s class is two-dimensional: a size band (MR, LR1, LR2) and, where it carries chemicals, an IBC ship type that governs how the hull is built. The product and chemical tanker CII calculator takes the size and operating profile and returns the operational carbon-intensity rating these same ships are graded on.
Handy and MR: the Medium Range workhorse
The smallest standard product-tanker classes are the Handy tanker and, the dominant one, the Medium Range. Conventions vary at the bottom edge, but the MR band sits in roughly the 25,000 to 55,000 deadweight range, with the core MR2 segment clustered around 45,000 to 50,000 dwt and a smaller MR1 or Handy segment below it near 25,000 to 40,000. The AFRA scale’s Medium Range band, as the EIA tabulates it, is defined by gasoline capacity rather than deadweight, on the order of 190,000 to 345,000 barrels, which corresponds to that deadweight range. The terms blur at the small end: some sources fold everything below MR into “Handy” or “GP” (General Purpose), and the AFRA General Purpose band sits below Medium Range.
The MR is the most numerous product tanker afloat because its size matches the trade. It is small enough to call at second-tier refineries and import terminals with depth or berth limits, and large enough to move a useful parcel of gasoline or diesel across a regional or medium-haul route economically. MRs run the intra-regional product trades: refined products around the Caribbean and US coasts, within the Mediterranean and Northwest Europe, across the Arabian Gulf to India and East Africa, and around Southeast Asia. When a refinery’s output has to reach a dozen smaller markets, the MR is the ship that fans it out. Its coated tanks let it switch from gasoline to jet to diesel across successive voyages, with a tank clean in between.
LR1: Long Range 1
The Long Range 1, or LR1, is the next band up, roughly 55,000 to 80,000 deadweight. The “Long Range” name is the giveaway: these ships were sized for the long-haul product trades, moving larger refined-product parcels over the intercontinental routes an MR is too small to serve economically. An LR1 carries the same clean products as an MR, gasoline, naphtha, jet, and gasoil, but in a parcel size that suits a full cargo from a large export refinery to a distant import region: the Arabian Gulf and India to Europe, or West to East on the naphtha trade into Asia.
An LR1 sits at the maximum size for the original Panama Canal locks, with the beam near 32.2 metres and length near 289.5 metres that the pre-expansion canal allowed, which is why some sources call an LR1 a “Panamax product tanker.” That heritage matters less since the canal’s 2016 expansion, but the LR1’s dimensions still reflect a generation of ships built to keep the Panama option open. Commercially the LR1 competes at its lower edge with the largest MRs and at its upper edge with the LR2, so the band’s boundaries are where the market language is loosest.
LR2: Long Range 2
The Long Range 2, or LR2, is the largest standard clean-product class, conventionally about 80,000 to 120,000 deadweight, with the core of the fleet near 110,000 to 115,000 dwt. Note the overlap: the LR2 deadweight band is essentially the same as the Aframax band. The difference is the cargo and the tanks, not the size. An LR2 is a coated ship carrying clean products; an Aframax is an uncoated ship carrying crude or dirty products. The same hull form, near 110,000 dwt, can be built either way, and a few ships even switch sides, trading clean as an LR2 then carrying dirty cargo for a spell, which is why “LR2 trading dirty” is a known market state. Treat any quoted LR2 upper edge with care: some sources extend it toward 160,000 dwt, but the operating LR2 fleet sits well below that, in the Aframax-overlap range, and the 80,000 to 120,000 band is the one the market trades.
The LR2 runs the heaviest clean-product trades: large naphtha and gasoil parcels from the Middle East and India to the Far East and to Europe, where the cargo size justifies the larger ship. It carries roughly twice an MR’s parcel, so it suits a trade with enough volume and a deep enough discharge terminal to take it. Because the LR2 shares the Aframax size, the two classes’ freight markets move together, and an owner of an LR2-sized hull watches both the clean BCTI and the dirty BDTI to decide which trade pays better at a given moment.
Crude tankers: the AFRA-named classes and the giants
Crude tankers carry unrefined crude oil and heavy residual products in uncoated steel tanks. They do not need coatings because crude does not demand the cleanliness a refined product does, and the trade is about moving the largest possible parcel from a loading terminal to a refinery as cheaply as possible per barrel. That economics drives the crude fleet toward size: the bigger the hull, the lower the cost per barrel-mile, bounded only by the draught and beam of the canals, straits, and terminals the ship must use. The crude classes run Aframax, Suezmax, VLCC, ULCC, smallest to largest, and the dirty side of the freight market that prices them is the Baltic Dirty Tanker Index, the BDTI, covered alongside the BCTI in Baltic Dry Index and freight indices. The crude oil tanker CII calculator grades these ships on the operational carbon-intensity scale that now governs their commercial standing.
Aframax: the AFRA band that became a name
The Aframax is the smallest standard crude class, roughly 80,000 to 120,000 deadweight, and its name is the clearest case of a freight scale becoming a ship type. Aframax is AFRA plus max: the top deadweight band on the Average Freight Rate Assessment scale Shell built in 1954. The EIA notes the term is an unofficial extension of the AFRA classification, which is why Aframax, unlike the strictly tabulated MR and LR bands, has fuzzier edges in everyday use. A figure near 80,000 to 120,000 dwt is the working convention.
The Aframax trade is the medium-haul crude trade and the short-sea crude trade where a larger ship will not fit or is not needed. Aframaxes carry crude across the Mediterranean, in the North Sea, across the Caribbean and from the US Gulf, in the Baltic, and around Southeast Asia: routes where the loading or discharge terminal has draught or parcel-size limits that rule out a Suezmax or VLCC, or where the haul is short enough that the smaller ship’s economics work. The Aframax is the largest crude class that can still serve a wide range of regional terminals, which is its commercial niche. As noted, an Aframax-sized hull built with coated tanks is an LR2, so the two share a freight-market boundary and an owner of such a ship reads both the dirty and clean tanker assessments.
Suezmax: the canal sets the size
The Suezmax is the next crude class up, roughly 120,000 to 200,000 deadweight and typically about 160,000, and it is named for a constraint rather than a freight band. A Suezmax is the largest tanker that can transit the Suez Canal in a laden condition. The limit is not a single deadweight figure but a relationship between the ship’s beam and the draught the canal can accept, which the Suez Canal Authority publishes in its Rules of Navigation as draught-against-beam tables, one for ballast transits and one for laden transits. The canal’s current depth allows a maximum laden draught around 20.1 metres at a moderate beam, with the permitted draught falling as the beam grows toward the maximum near 77.5 metres. A laden Suezmax is sized to stay inside that envelope.
The Suezmax trade is the medium-to-long-haul crude trade where the cargo is large enough to want a ship bigger than an Aframax but the routing must transit Suez laden or call at a terminal that cannot take a VLCC. The classic Suezmax routes are West African crude to Europe and to the US East Coast, Black Sea and Mediterranean crude, and Middle East crude to the Mediterranean through the canal. Because the canal has been deepened repeatedly, the practical Suezmax size has crept up over the decades, which is exactly why the deadweight figure is approximate: the name tracks the canal, and the canal keeps changing. An owner deciding whether a given crude parcel justifies a Suezmax over an Aframax, or whether to size up to a VLCC, weighs the freight each class earns on the BDTI against the parcel size and the terminal limits.
VLCC: the Very Large Crude Carrier
The Very Large Crude Carrier, the VLCC, is the workhorse of the long-haul crude trade, roughly 200,000 to 320,000 deadweight and carrying close to 2 million barrels of crude. The EIA puts the VLCC cargo capacity at about 1.9 to 2.2 million barrels. VLCCs emerged as the crude trade scaled up from the 1960s, when the oil majors found that moving crude in a single very large hull cut the cost per barrel sharply over the long ocean hauls from the Middle East to Europe, the US, and Asia. A laden VLCC is too deep for the Suez Canal, so the historical Middle East-to-Europe VLCC trade ran around the Cape of Good Hope, and the partial alternative was to part-discharge or use the SUMED pipeline alongside the canal.
The VLCC trade is the backbone of the seaborne crude market: Middle East Gulf to China, Japan, South Korea, and India, West Africa to the Far East, and US Gulf to Asia on the longer hauls. The single most-watched tanker route in the world, TD3C on the Baltic Dirty Tanker Index, is a 270,000-tonne VLCC voyage from the Middle East Gulf to China, and when analysts speak of “VLCC earnings” they usually mean the TD3C assessment expressed as a daily Time Charter Equivalent, the mechanics of which are set out in Baltic Dry Index and freight indices. A VLCC’s draught restricts the terminals that can load and discharge it fully, so VLCC loading often relies on deepwater terminals or offshore single-point moorings, and discharge can require lightering, transferring part of the cargo to smaller ships, where the receiving port is too shallow for a fully laden VLCC.
ULCC: the Ultra Large Crude Carrier
The Ultra Large Crude Carrier, the ULCC, is the largest tanker class ever built, above roughly 320,000 deadweight and historically up to about 550,000, carrying more than 3 million barrels. The EIA records ULCC cargo capacity from about 2 to 3.7 million barrels. ULCCs were a product of the 1970s, when crude trade volumes and the long Cape routing after the 1967 to 1975 Suez closure pushed owners toward the absolute largest hulls the economics seemed to favor. The largest tankers ever built, such as the Seawise Giant (later Jahre Viking), reached into the mid-500,000s deadweight.
Very few ULCCs remain in service, and the reason is the same draught and size that made them economical in theory: a laden ULCC draws too much water and is too large for most ports, terminals, and canals, so the number of routes it can serve fully laden is small, and the inflexibility outweighs the per-barrel saving over a VLCC for most trades. The market settled on the VLCC as the largest practical crude class, and the ULCC became a niche of a handful of ships, some used as floating storage rather than in active trade. The class survives as a category more than as a fleet: it names the size above VLCC, which the market reaches into only rarely.
The economics that built the ULCC came partly from geography that no longer holds. The Suez Canal was closed from the 1967 war until 1975, forcing all Middle East crude to Europe around the Cape of Good Hope, a routing so long that the largest possible hull made sense to spread the voyage cost over the most barrels. When the canal reopened and later deepened, and when the SUMED pipeline gave an alternative to a laden Suez transit, the case for the ULCC over the VLCC weakened, because a VLCC could serve more of the trade with far less port and draught trouble. The VLCC’s own draught still shapes its operation: where a discharge port is too shallow for a fully laden VLCC, the ship lighters part of its cargo to a smaller tanker offshore before berthing, an operation routine in the US Gulf and parts of Asia. The class hierarchy, in other words, is not just a size ladder; it is a map of which ship can physically reach which terminal with how much cargo, which is why the trade keeps a spread of classes rather than running everything in the largest hull available.
Reference table: classes, bands, and constraints
The table sets the classes in order with the working deadweight band, the cargo each typically carries, and the constraint that defines or names it. The bands are market conventions, not regulation; treat the edges as approximate and read them with the caveats in the limitations section.
| Class | Deadweight band (dwt) | Cargo | Defining constraint or name origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Handy / MR | 25,000 to 55,000 | Clean products (gasoline, jet, diesel) | AFRA Medium Range band; coated tanks; regional and medium-haul trades |
| LR1 | 55,000 to 80,000 | Clean products | AFRA Long Range 1; original Panama Canal locks (beam near 32.2 m) |
| LR2 | 80,000 to 120,000 | Clean products | AFRA Long Range 2; same hull size as Aframax, coated instead of bare steel |
| Aframax | 80,000 to 120,000 | Crude and dirty products | Largest AFRA band: AFRA plus max; medium-haul and short-sea crude |
| Suezmax | 120,000 to 200,000 (typ. ~160,000) | Crude | Largest laden ship the Suez Canal accepts (draught-and-beam table) |
| VLCC | 200,000 to 320,000 | Crude (~2 million barrels) | Very Large Crude Carrier; named for capacity; too deep for laden Suez |
| ULCC | above 320,000 (hist. to ~550,000) | Crude (over 3 million barrels) | Ultra Large Crude Carrier; named for capacity; draught restricts ports |
The AFRA scale also defines a General Purpose band below Medium Range, and the EIA tabulates the AFRA bands by cargo-barrel capacity rather than deadweight: the Medium Range band at roughly 190,000 to 345,000 barrels of gasoline and the Long Range 1 band at roughly 345,000 to 615,000 barrels of gasoline or 310,000 to 550,000 barrels of light sweet crude. The deadweight figures in the table are the everyday equivalents the market quotes.
Double-hull construction and the single-hull phase-out
Every tanker in these classes built since the mid-1990s has a double hull, and that is a regulatory fact with hard dates behind it, not a design preference. The trigger was the Exxon Valdez grounding in Prince William Sound in 1989, after which the United States passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA 90), requiring all new tankers trading to US waters to be built with double hulls. The IMO followed in 1992 with an amendment to MARPOL Annex I making double hulls (or an approved alternative design) mandatory for tankers of 5,000 dwt and above ordered after 6 July 1993, under what is now Regulation 19 of Annex I. The double-hull requirement was extended to existing ships from 1995 under the old Regulation 13G, now Regulation 20. The IMO had already required segregated ballast tanks on new oil tankers from a 1983 MARPOL amendment, so that ballast water need not sit in cargo tanks, which removed one routine source of operational oil pollution before the double hull addressed the accidental kind.
The single-hull phase-out then accelerated after two European casualties. The Erika broke up off France in 1999 and the Prestige off Spain in 2002, both single-hull tankers, and both spilled heavy fuel oil onto European coasts. The IMO adopted amendments to MARPOL Annex I in April 2001, effective September 2002, that brought the international phase-out closer to OPA 90: single-hull tankers were sorted into categories by build year, size, and whether they had double bottoms or sides, with the final phase-out of all single-hull tankers set for 2015. The largest single-hull crude tankers had to go at 25 years of age, or 30 if fitted with segregated ballast tanks. The practical result is that the modern Aframax, Suezmax, VLCC, and ULCC fleet is entirely double-hulled, with a cargo block surrounded by ballast space that absorbs a grounding or collision before the cargo tanks are breached.
The double hull changed the ships’ dimensions within each class. A double-hull Suezmax or VLCC carries its cargo in a narrower, deeper tank block than the single-hull ship of the same deadweight, because the wing and bottom ballast space eats into the beam and depth available for cargo. That is one reason the deadweight bands drifted over the decades: a 2025 Suezmax built to the double-hull standard and the deepened Suez envelope is a different ship from a 1990 single-hull Suezmax, even though both wear the same class name. The construction detail behind the double hull, segregated ballast, and the inert-gas and crude-oil-washing systems is covered in oil tanker.
Worldscale, the dirty and clean markets, and the standard ship
The freight a tanker class earns is quoted on Worldscale, the New Worldwide Tanker Nominal Freight Scale, and the link between Worldscale and these size classes is direct: the Worldscale standard vessel is an Aframax-scale ship. The standard vessel is defined as a 75,000-tonne capacity tanker steaming at 14.5 knots and burning on the order of 55 tonnes of fuel a day at sea and about 5 tonnes a day in port. Worldscale builds a flat rate (WS100) for each route so that this 75,000-tonne standard ship earns the same notional daily return everywhere, and a real fixture is then quoted as a percentage of that flat rate. The mechanics of how a Worldscale percentage and the flat rate become dollars per tonne are set out in Baltic Dry Index and freight indices.
That a VLCC and an MR are both priced off the same Worldscale machinery, with a standard ship sitting at the Aframax scale, has a consequence for reading freight across classes. A VLCC carrying nearly three times the standard ship’s cargo earns its scale on a different cost base, and the Worldscale percentage on a VLCC route is not comparable to the percentage on an MR route without converting both to a daily Time Charter Equivalent for the actual ship. This is why the dirty and clean tanker indices report their headline routes as TCE, and why an owner comparing whether to trade an LR2-sized hull clean or dirty looks at the TCE each market pays, not the raw Worldscale number.
The crude classes are priced on the Baltic Dirty Tanker Index (BDTI) and the clean product classes on the Baltic Clean Tanker Index (BCTI), and the route codes on each map onto the size classes in this article. On the dirty side, the VLCC bellwether is TD3C, the Middle East Gulf to China route, with Suezmax and Aframax trades carrying their own TD codes across the Atlantic and Mediterranean. On the clean side, the MR and LR routes anchor the transatlantic gasoline arbitrage and the Pacific product trades. A tanker owner reads the index for the class their ship belongs to, then converts the route assessment to a TCE for their specific vessel, the workflow the crude oil tanker CII calculator and product and chemical tanker CII calculator sit alongside on the operational side.
The relative weight of each class in the world fleet shifts with trade patterns, which is why the freight markets for the classes move independently. UNCTAD tracks the tanker fleet annually in its Review of Maritime Transport, and the crude orderbook has swung sharply in recent years: it fell to about 4.4% of fleet capacity in 2023, the lowest in three decades, before recovering toward 7.5% in early 2024 as owners ordered crude tankers to replace aging tonnage and to serve the longer hauls that the rerouting of Russian crude created. A class that is short of modern tonnage and long on demand earns more, which feeds straight back into the BDTI and BCTI levels a chartering desk watches. The size class, then, is not only a description of a hull; it is the unit in which the tanker market measures supply, demand, and price.
Reading the bands without misreading them
The single most common error is to treat the deadweight bands as precise and fixed. They are neither. Only the AFRA product-tanker bands (GP, MR, LR1, LR2) and the Aframax label rest on a documented scale, and even those are tabulated by cargo-barrel capacity, not a hard deadweight cutoff. Suezmax, VLCC, and ULCC are descriptive trade terms whose edges differ from one broker, owner, or analyst to the next. The ranges in this article are the working conventions, not regulation. A ship at a boundary belongs to whichever class the speaker finds useful, and the only authoritative size figure for a specific vessel is the deadweight on its own particulars.
The clean-versus-dirty distinction matters more than the size band at the LR2-Aframax boundary. Two ships of identical 110,000 deadweight can be an LR2 or an Aframax depending entirely on whether the tanks are coated and what cargo the ship is fixed for. The size band tells you the parcel; the coating and trade tell you which market prices it. An owner watching only deadweight, and ignoring whether a ship is clean or dirty, misreads which freight index governs that ship’s earnings. The BCTI prices the clean LR2; the BDTI prices the dirty Aframax of the same size.
The canal-named classes track moving targets. Suezmax follows the Suez Canal’s published draught-and-beam envelope, which has been enlarged repeatedly, so a “Suezmax” built in 1995 and one built in 2025 are not the same size, and the deadweight figure drifts upward with each canal deepening. Panamax product tankers shifted when the Panama Canal expanded in 2016. Any comparison of canal-named tonnage across decades has to account for the waterway changing under the name, which is the same discipline the Suez Canal article applies to transit limits and tolls.
Limitations
The deadweight ranges given here are market conventions compiled from broker and operator usage and the AFRA scale as the EIA tabulates it. They are not legal or regulatory definitions, and they overlap at the boundaries, the LR2-Aframax overlap near 80,000 to 120,000 dwt being the clearest case. Where an exact band edge matters for a contract, a financing covenant, or a fleet statistic, confirm it against the specific source that defines the term in that context, because no single authority owns the boundaries of Suezmax, VLCC, or ULCC.
This article classifies tankers by deadweight and cargo type. It does not cover the full naval-architecture detail that distinguishes ships within a class: the double-hull requirements of MARPOL Annex I, the segregated-ballast and cargo-tank arrangements, the inert-gas and crude-oil-washing systems, or the IBC Code’s detailed construction rules for each chemical ship type, which the chemical tanker article treats. Two ships of the same deadweight and class can differ in age, hull configuration, coating system, and pumping capacity in ways that change their commercial value far more than the class label suggests. The companion calculators grade a ship’s operational carbon intensity from its size and operating profile; they are not vessel-design tools and do not certify a ship’s class, tank type, or canal eligibility.
The freight context, which index prices which class and how a Worldscale percentage or a Time Charter Equivalent turns a route assessment into a daily earning, is treated in Baltic Dry Index and freight indices, not here. This article names the classes and their constraints; the freight article prices them. The two are meant to be read together for a full picture of how a tanker’s size band becomes a dollar figure in the market.
See also
- Baltic Dry Index and freight indices: how the BDTI and BCTI price each tanker class and how Worldscale and TCE turn a route into dollars.
- Oil tanker: construction, double-hull rules, and the crude and product trades these classes serve.
- Chemical tanker: the IBC Code ship types and the stricter construction rules for noxious-liquid cargoes.
- Suez Canal: the draught-and-beam transit limit that defines the Suezmax class.
- Crude oil tanker CII calculator: operational carbon-intensity rating for Aframax, Suezmax, VLCC, and ULCC crude tankers.
- Product and chemical tanker CII calculator: operational carbon-intensity rating for MR, LR1, and LR2 product and chemical tankers.