# Tanker question



## R831814 (Jun 9, 2006)

Sorry if this has been asked before but can anyone tell me why the huge tankers of the 80's were (mostly) scrapped after a very short life (10 yrs) What changed to make them dinasaurs?


----------



## John Farrell (Mar 20, 2011)

What a huge question!
In short Shipping Economics.....the never ending pursuit of a more attractive bottom line from Shipowners and end user.


----------



## trotterdotpom (Apr 29, 2005)

Suez Canal re-opened in 1975. Maybe these ships were too big to pass through it and they became uneconomical compared with the largest tankers which were able to transit. Just a guess.

John T.


----------



## John Farrell (Mar 20, 2011)

Not forgetting the great 'steam turbine re-engining'

Particularly sad for me as I loved steam turbines.


----------



## surfaceblow (Jan 16, 2008)

You are forgetting about the OPA 90 rules that phased out single hull tankers. The insurance and public opinion for another large Exxon Valdez type incident would have been another blow that the oil companies and shippers could do without.

Joe


----------



## borderreiver (Oct 11, 2008)

The VLCC built in the late 60 which i worked on with KOTC and all the others tanks half coated. not fitted with fixed tank cleaning and most important no inert gas system. tank stripping by up and down pumps. After a few voyages over a mtr of sludge which had to be hand dug.
Engine break downs very common One night nearly all vlcc from the gulf around the Cape were stopped with engine break downs. ( we did a call on the VHF all the way from the Gulf to the bay with ships passing the a msg from one to another.So it was cheaper to scape then to rebuilt.


----------



## Jon Vincent (Dec 31, 2006)

It was pure economics, the price of fuel oil and the high consumption of the steam turbines, this led to slow steaming around the cape. BP re-engined a VLCC with a diesel motor and this was very expensive and not that successful. Re-engining vsl over 300,000 was never achieved because at the time the engines available were not powerful enough.


----------



## callpor (Jan 31, 2007)

Tanker economics of the early 1980's sent many of these 1970's built steam powered V & ULCC's to an early end. Freight rates were at rock bottom and the replacement value of a VLCC was zero. One of the first jobs I had after coming ashore with one of the oil-majors was to assist coordination in the lay-up of 50 of their V and ULCC's. By 1983 only one of their VLCC's was trading. It was similar with all the other oil majors. I well remember aerial photos taken around 1984 of the dozens of tankers in lay-up at Alesund, Noway, particularly five ULCC's moored together - each over 500KDWT; 2 x Esso; 2 Shell; 1 ELF. It was similar in Brunei Bay. By the late 1980's most had been sold or scrapped.


----------



## fred henderson (Jun 13, 2005)

In the late sixties the demand for oil products was climbing like a rocket and a massive VLCC building programme was initiated to transport oil from the Middle East to the USA, Europe and Japan. This quite rightly caused OPEC to realise that they were selling their finite supply of oil too cheaply and in 1973 they doubled the price (partly in retaliation to yet another Arab-Israeli war) and five year’s later doubled the price again.

These huge price increases led to a world-wide recession and a dramatic fall in the demand for oil. Furthermore the new oil price made the development of North Sea and Alaskan oilfields feasible. As a result the instead of the volume of Middle East oil exports growing it fell and the vast new VLCC fleet was not needed. The major oil companies laid-up the bulk of their fleets and many of the independent shipowners went out of business.


----------



## Burntisland Ship Yard (Aug 2, 2008)

Economics, planned life, slow speed running, it was claimed that within 2 years of maiden voyage a VLCC was paid for and the rest was bunce so to speak. I remember taking the Texaco Cardiff to scrap in Taiwan [she was circa 1958 build] during 1980, and we were moored along side th Olympic Sky, she was about 8 years old.
Of course the "little" spill that Exxon had sealed the fate of a huge amount of 60's / early 70's constructed VLCC's


----------



## david freeman (Jan 26, 2006)

Reg Mercer said:


> Sorry if this has been asked before but can anyone tell me why the huge tankers of the 80's were (mostly) scrapped after a very short life (10 yrs) What changed to make them dinasaurs?


One factor was slow steaming round the cape- Expensive if done by a steam powered tanker: Coupled with this was all though steam turbine plant in theory could deliver the neccessay SHP at full steaming, some of the manufactured plants had Single and a half boilers or two equal output boilers, and where roof fired and other technological enovations when developing full output through a standard turbine set HP;LP the power developed was transmitted then through a gear box of some format. The epicyclic gearboxes at the time could absorb and transmit the power but the wear rate of component parts made reliability at full output questionable? maybe?
So Economis played a big part a superVLCC of the day neither did any of its duties correctly, and was inefficent at slow speed and had questionable reliability at full staeming. The cost of heavy fuel oil was expensive, and as mentioned the days of a single skinned tanker were numbered: as also the size of each cargo tank within the vessel should a possible breach and pollution occur such as the Valdiz. Egdum callas shiaib. (Nackered)(EEK)


----------



## lesliedobson (Feb 8, 2009)

Economics certainly played its part. I heard that many ships were scapped because of the terrible state of the hulls. I witnessed a lot of patching but also recall that it was found significant errosion of plates around elephants feet where the crude flowed in and out of the tanks. So much so that it was deemed uneconomical to effect repairs.


----------



## Jon Vincent (Dec 31, 2006)

You heard right, the "Nordic Clanesman/Commander" were two such tankers that deemed uneconomical to repair, one had bad separation of the keel plate and keelson, due to reported bad loading programs in the loading computers. Generaly speaking these two were not UK finnest.


----------



## wavedweller (Oct 4, 2011)

Hi Reg.
Quite simple really. The ships were so ginormous, (over 1k ft in length) that, especially in the dark, people were getting lost and not seen for days especially as they only carried about 30 or so crew. On top of that people were going doolally by not finding any-one to talk to.

keep 'er orf the knuckle 'arry.


----------



## E.Martin (Sep 6, 2008)

*Olympic Tanker?*

What happened to the Olympic Tanker on her maiden trip ran aground on the French or Spanish Coast this happened sometime in the fifties,I believe she was a total loss.
Was she ever cut up?


----------



## Duncan112 (Dec 28, 2006)

Seems to have been left to the seas...

http://www.cedre.fr/en/spill/olympic/olympic.php

I remember hearing a story at college that maybe, just maybe it was a deliberate accident (bit of an oxymoron there) as with no charter income on a new ship the repayments couldn't be funded so a CTL was the way to go, 

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,879633,00.html

And on 

http://thejackalman.blogspot.com/2011/10/who-owns-rena.html

Captain Colin Smith M.Sc. said...

Of course there have been insurance 'groundings', the classic being the "Olympic Bravery", a new Onassis tanker that was going from the builders yard to lay up in Norway in 1976. The market at the time was in a deep slump. The ship was insured for $50 million which was at least least five times her market value in the slump into which she was delivered. So there were some eyebrows raised about this loss. This may explain the delays and the lackluster attempt to get her off. This casualty was a great boon to the owner. I was at sea at the time and remember Greek seaman I met in foreign ports joking about the 'casualty'.


----------



## david freeman (Jan 26, 2006)

Reg Mercer said:


> Sorry if this has been asked before but can anyone tell me why the huge tankers of the 80's were (mostly) scrapped after a very short life (10 yrs) What changed to make them dinasaurs?


MARPOL and the demise of the single skinned vessel, after the EXXON Valdezise and AMOCO CAdiz incidents. These vessels were prematurely scrapped???(Scribe)(Night)


----------



## sparks69 (Dec 18, 2005)

I remember a steel inspector in Singapore saying it was poor quality steel.


----------

