It's boom time for big crude carriers
Countries like China and India are chartering vessels to take advantage of lower oil prices and top off their reserves
London
JONATHAN Lee has spent 30 years in the shipping business. But he was as excited as a rookie over the scene on his screen one recent day here at the international nerve centre of his oil tanker chartering and dispatching company.
Although petroleum prices are down worldwide, the business of sending two-million-barrel supertankers across the seas has never been brisker - or more global.
Mr Lee, who works alongside colleagues in an office that could pass for a suburban stockbroker's, pointed to an arrow on his computer screen. It showed the location of the supertanker Leonidas, under charter to a subsidiary of the giant Chinese oil company Sinopec.
The Leonidas, travelling empty from the northern China port of Qingdao, after a stop at Singapore for fuel, was on its way around the southern tip of Africa. Its destination was a port in Gabon in West Africa. There, it would load a cargo of crude oil and head back to Ch…
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