The cost of renting a vessel for transporting oil exceeded launching a rocket into space

Chartering a tanker to transport oil from the United States to China turned out to be more expensive than launching a rocket. Bloomberg reports that the cost of renting the vessel exceeded the cost of launching a spacecraft.

Amid a global tanker shortage that is worsening with each additional barrel of oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz, freight costs have soared to around $80 million, while the cost of a standard SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch is estimated at $74 million. For comparison, for the same money at the beginning of this year you could buy a new tanker.

Brokerage firm SSY says that even after adjusting for inflation, rates are now the highest since the first supertankers appeared on the world's oceans in the 1960s. This is a record that surpasses the tanker wars of the 1980s, when Iran and Iraq attacked commercial ships in the Persian Gulf.

“There really aren’t enough ships. Prices are rising parabolically,” Russell Hardy, CEO of Vitol Group, the world’s largest independent oil trader, said at the conference.

Oil companies in the Middle East are forced to transfer oil from one tanker to another vessel using the so-called “shuttle method,” which increases the duration of the voyage by about a week. The unstable nature of trade flows due to the unstable and constantly changing situation in the region creates additional stress on the global fleet. Volatility has reached such extreme levels that it can be difficult for traders to estimate exact shipping costs, Hardy said.