The Tanker Map shows the crude oil and LNG tankers we can follow at sea, drawn from the positions they broadcast and refreshed every ten minutes. It covers about 7,400 ships. Our energy desk uses it to see where cargoes are heading, where they wait, and where they meet.
What you are looking at
Each dot is one ship, placed at its last reported position and pointed along its heading. Click a dot to see its name, type, size, reported destination and the last port it called at. The trail behind a selected ship shows its past 30 days.
The map covers seagoing tankers of 10,000 deadweight tonnes and above: crude carriers from the smallest coastal ships to the largest VLCCs, product tankers that carry refined fuels, and LNG carriers. Chemical tankers and bunker barges are not yet included. Use the filters at the top to show one type, one size class or one region at a time; the counts in the corner update as you filter.
What the colours mean
- Dark red: crude or product tanker, laden
- Pale red: crude or product tanker, in ballast (empty)
- Dark blue: LNG carrier, laden
- Pale blue: LNG carrier, in ballast
- Grey: no position for more than twelve hours
- Amber ring: two tankers within 200 metres for more than six hours outside a port, a possible ship-to-ship transfer
We call a ship laden only when it has called at a loading terminal since its last discharge. The draught the crew reports is not enough on its own, because it is typed by hand and often left unchanged.
Known blind spots
The map is only as good as the broadcasts behind it. Satellite coverage is thinner in parts of the open ocean, so ships can go grey for hours without doing anything unusual. Some ships switch their transponders off. Some broadcast false positions. We filter tracks that jump impossibly far between reports, but a careful spoof can look plausible, which is why no story leaves our desk on map data alone.
Ports are a smaller blind spot. Inside busy harbours, many ships report from a small area at once and some messages are lost, so a ship at berth can briefly appear to jump or vanish. We smooth positions inside port limits and do not flag meetings there.
How fresh the positions are
Positions on the public map are delayed by one hour. The delay costs readers little and keeps the map from being used to follow a ship in real time. Our reporters work from the undelayed data.
Privacy
The map shows ships, not people. We do not publish crew lists or any data about seafarers, and we remove every vessel that is not a tanker, including yachts and fishing boats. Ship names, owners and managers come from public registers. If you believe the map shows something it should not, write to us through the contact page and we will review it within two working days.
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