A Long Range 2 tanker has been reportedly chartered to load a Europe-bound cargo of jet fuel from China, a rare supplier of the middle distillate west of the Suez Canal.
The Abliani was chartered by CSSSA, the shipping arm of French oil company Total, according to information supplied by shipbrokers. The 90,000-ton cargo is said to be clean petroleum product, but is assumed to be jet fuel, which Total regularly ship to Europe from the Middle East Gulf and occasionally from the Far East.
The vessel is due to load from Tianjin on July 17, based on shipbroker reports, and is currently heading north in the South China Sea after last calling at South Korea, satellite-tracking data shows. If the ship charter goes as planned, the vessel would make a month-long voyage that would see it arrive by mid-to- late August.
One of the few cargoes seen shipping jet fuel to Europe from China was last tracked in November 2015, when Noble had 65,000 tons of jet fuel on the Chrisopigi Lady, which discharge in the U.K., according to the OPIS Tanker Tracker.
So far around 90,000 metric tons of jet fuel from China, equivalent to one Long Range 2 tanker, has been imported by the 28 member countries in the first five months of this year, the latest European Commission trade data shows.
Some 320,000 tons was shipped for all of 2015, which equates to about three tankers, Eurostat figures show. Overall imports of jet fuel into Europe in 2015 totaled nearly 22 million tons, with more than two-thirds sourced from the Middle East Gulf.