2026 in tanker shipping and trade: deliveries, decarbonisation, shifting geopolitics

The tanker market enters 2026 with a firmer sense of its constraints than a year earlier.

2025 showed how earnings relied on sanctions, detours around conflict zones and an ageing fleet, rather than on broad-based growth in oil demand.

The task in 2026 is to navigate a delivery-heavy orderbook, unresolved geopolitical risk and a tightening regulatory framework without repeating the excesses of previous cycles.

On the supply side, delivery risk is the defining feature: only a few VLCCs joined the fleet in 2025, but the first wave of the 155-ship VLCC orderbook placed in recent years will arrive through 2026.

Those vessels will meet a crude fleet where replacement has lagged and where many units are approaching expensive surveys. Owners that delayed scrapping during the strong markets of 2023 to 2025 will face harder decisions as younger, more-efficient tonnage appears, especially if charterers continue to prefer ships with lower fuel consumption and clearer emissions profiles.

For product tankers, the starting point is softer: BIMCO’s analysis at the end of 2025 already pointed to oversupply pressures and warned that geopolitical tonne-mile support could not fully offset new capacity and slower demand growth in some trades.

Unless refinery closures remove capacity or demand accelerates in new markets, 2026 is likely to feel more like a year of balance-sheet repair and portfolio optimisation for LR2, LR1 and MR tankers than a continuation of the previous upcycle.

The low MR orderbook offers some protection, but it cannot fully neutralise ships already on the way.

Trade patterns will continue to hinge on geopolitics, but the range of outcomes has widened.

In a base case where sanctions on Russia persist and risks in the Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz remain elevated, 2025’s detours via the Cape of Good Hope will still inflate tonne-miles.

VLCCs and Suezmax tankers would retain longer voyages from the Middle East and Atlantic basins into Asia and Europe, while Aframax and product tankers would still benefit from reconfigured regional flows and the need to replace constrained Russian barrels.

"The more radical scenario is a political settlement that reshapes sanctions"

If a second Trump administration forces through a peace agreement under which Russia resumes crude oil, oil product and gas exports with revenues earmarked for Ukrainian reconstruction, tanker employment would change quickly.

Sanctioned barrels would shift back towards mainstream trades, insurance and class cover would return to many vessels, and the discounts that sustained the grey fleet would narrow, cutting values for older, high-risk ships.

Such a settlement would also redraw European trade - refiners could again buy Russian crude oil and oil products directly rather than relying on cargoes refined in India or Turkey from Russian feedstock.

Shorter voyages into Europe would reduce tonne-miles and erode some of the support that longhaul replacements from the Americas and Middle East provided in 2025, while escrow arrangements for reconstruction payments would raise documentation demands and reward owners with transparent structures and strong compliance systems.

The shadow fleet sits at the centre of this transition: in 2025, older ships dominated sale-and-purchase activity and the grey fleet expanded as buyers with opaque backing accumulated tonnage.

In 2026, if sanctions are relaxed, refocused or simply better enforced, a portion of that fleet could return to mainstream trades after upgrades, reclassification and closer vetting. Many tankers, however, will struggle to justify the investment needed to meet regulatory and commercial expectations in a less distorted market.

An increase in recycling would not be surprising, particularly if the influx of new VLCCs coincides with shorter Russian routes and softer freight.