INTRODUCTION

 Tankers have been one of the oldest types of merchant ships; the
need for these vessels arising due to heterogeneous distribution of
natural oil reserves and liquid chemicals around the globe.
 The most common types of tankers operating at sea are oil tankers.
While it may seem that oil tankers generally carry oil, the fact has
quite more to it, if understood in detail. Which brings us to the need
to understand that since there are different grades of oil
(depending on the levels of purification), oil tankers have been
designed separately and specifically to carry different oil types.
 These tanker ships can be categorized into different types, based on
two criteria – Size and Type of cargo.
TANKER SHIP BASED ON SIZE

1. Small Range (Product) Tanker: 10,000 to 60,000 tons DWT.

2. Panamax Tanker: 60,000 to 78,000 tons DWT.
3. Aframax (Average Freight Rate Assessment) Tanker: 80,000 to
1,20,000 tons DWT.
4. Suezmax Tanker: 1,20,000 to 2,00,000 tons DWT.
5. VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier): 2,00,000 to 3,20,000 DWT.
6. ULCC (Ultra Large Crude Carrier): 3,20,000 to 5,50,000 DWT.

The classification of oil tankers based on type of cargo is not a clear and fixed
classification, because these are terms used by different nations and
organizations based on their ease of nomenclature.
TANKER SHIP BASED ON TYPE

Product Tankers:
 These tankers are designed to carry hydrocarbon products like
kerosene, gasoline, paraffin, etc., chemical products like ammonia,
monomers, etc., wines, molasses, etc.
 Though, now, chemical tankers, LPG and LNG carriers are classified
differently due to significant uniqueness in their designs as
compared to petroleum product tankers.
 Product tankers are usually short range coastal tankers, hence are
smaller in capacity. They carry products from processing plants to
distribution units.
Crude Oil Carriers:
 Crude oil carriers are designed to transport crude oil from rigs to
processing units (refineries).
 Since the amount of crude oil extracted from offshore drilling
platforms is considerably larger than the amount of products
extracted from it, crude oil tankers are required to be of sizes larger
than product tankers.
 Sizes like that of VLCCs and ULCCs are only used for crude oil
tankers, and these are usually ships that ply on long range voyages.
Chemical Tankers:
 Chemical products like ammonia, palm oil, vegetable oils,
monomers, caustic soda, methanol, etc. These ships have
considerable uniqueness in their design, owing to the special
requirements depending on the type of cargo. We will discuss these
aspects in a later part of this article when we discuss design of
different tankers. Chemical tankers are usually categorised into
three types:
• Type 1: These tankers are designed to carry products that are
associated with severe environmental and safety related hazards.
Such products require maximum prevention of spill.
• Type 2: They are also designed for hazardous products, but the
extent of severity for these products is lesser as compared to Type 1.
• Type 3: These are designed to carry chemical cargo that requires
moderate standards of containment and pose moderate
environmental and safety hazards.
LNG and LPG Carriers:
 These ships actually fall under the category of liquefied gas carriers,
and a large number of them are in service to carry liquefied gases in
bulk.
 The number of ships that carry Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) is
however, much more than the number of ships carrying Liquefied
Natural Gas (LNG). We shall look into some of their design aspects in
another article to understand what makes them very unique from
other types of tankers.
 With an overview of the different types of tankers and each of their
functionality, we will now look into the important design aspects of
each of them.
 It is important for you to keep in mind from now, to observe how
every design decision that is made, is directly or indirectly related to
a functional aspect of the ship. We will relate every design aspect
with the inter-related functional or market-based reason that
governs it.