Supership sails towards 50
What reflecting on the 1970s tanker world can tell us about today
Some books float at the edges of the ocean of one’s life, occasionally coming closer to the center before receding, often unread, again. For me, Noël Mostert’s Supership is one of those books. I first saw it decades ago as an undergraduate student; it always seemed interesting enough to keep but never compelling enough to make it to the top of the to-read pile. I finally decided to read my copy (from the amazing Montague Book Mill) or give it away. Inside, I found a slow-in-places portrait of the tanker industry in transition, told through a voyage on P&O’s 217,000 DWT tanker Ardshiel. Written in the early 1970s, it captures the final ascent to the peak of tanker size growth and the challenges in the first wave of modern VLCC/ULCCs, the emergence of flags of convenience, the worse years of marine oil pollution, and the retreat of oil majors from direct ship ownership.
Written roughly a decade after Carson’s Silent Spring, the book focuses mainly on oil pollution resulting from the rapid ship size growth and slipping standards in the 1970s. A much smaller part of the book deals with the ship, the crew, and a general sense of the loss that occurred as ship size grew, ships became more efficient, and traditional flags vanished. As it approaches 50 years of age, the call to action in the book is dated beyond usefulness. However, seeing what transpired after the book’s appearance and how the concerns the book highlights were addressed is informative today. Additionally, the opinionated but informative The Tankship Tromedy by Jack Devanney is a great comparison book. Both Supership and The Tankship Tromedy forecast disasters that (largely) failed to materialize as predicted while providing a vivid description of challenges in safely transporting oil.
The industry tends to move too fast and too far when money is on the table
Supership was written as tanker size growth and offshore flagging radically reshaped the industry, and freight rates were sky-high. Ships could pay off a significant percentage of their purchase price in a single voyage. The pressure was on to get as many ships out of the yard as fast as possible and into service. Yards were pressured to build quickly, minimally, and to standardized as much as possible. It’s difficult to expand a shipyard meaningfully before an order boom passes, so raising prices and throughput remain the key focus areas in boom times. Without much experience with vessels this size, these early large tankers had significant structural defects, machinery reliability problems, and issues around tank explosions from static electricity buildup during tank washing. The latter was likely always a problem, but the probability of a tank explosion grew with tank size, so explosions became a common problem on these large ships. Furthermore, this rapid growth in size was led by independent tanker operators such as Daniel Ludwig and Aristotle Onassis, who were keen on making a fortune. These new operators moved ships to flags of convenience, forced class societies to compete with one another, and pushed for ever-greater economies of scale, taking risks that oil majors largely would not.
The minimal standards Mostert highlights in construction, combined with owners looking to maximize profits through minimal operation, would plague this entire generation of ships. In the end, this generation of ships was not particularly successful technically. Ardshiel, the vessel Mostert sailed on, had frequent trouble making enough fresh water to replace lost boiler feed water. This could result in a complete loss of propulsion. She was scrapped after only an 11-year service life, including eight years with P&O. Amoco Cadiz would become the most (in)famous of these ships, her underdesigned and incorrectly fabricated steering gear failing, sending the vessel onto the coast of Brittany in 1978 less than five years after her launch. The money was good while it lasted, but without sky-high freight rates, the ships were not worth the price of fixing them.
The industry almost never moves in a straight line
Mostert looks out at an industry in transition and rightfully points out that if things continue on the same path, the amount of oil dumped into the ocean will be intolerable. This oil came from tank washings, which were then done with seawater and the slops dumped overboard, as well as increasingly large accidents. Supership focuses primarily on the impact of oil on the Southern Ocean and its food web. To modern eyes, there is a shocking amount of oil persisting in the environment - so much so that vessels routinely get externally fouled by floating slicks. However, the marine industry is strongly cyclical; Supership appeared in 1974, as the Yom Kippur War oil embargo was biting into oil demand, the Suez Canal re-opens in 1975, and the 1979 Iranian revolution further increased the cost of oil and decreased the demand. Devanney notes that the resulting crash in tanker rates allowed oil majors to become more picky in which ships they were willing to charter. Likewise, the negative publicity from the Amoco Cadiz loss in 1978 also encouraged oil companies to demand higher standards.
These collapsing freight rates then forced many of the problematic first-generation supertankers into the scrapyard, where Ardshiel found herself in 1980 having briefly served with a second owner. Thus, the changing freight market, plus MARPOL 73/78, significantly bent the curve of oil discharges at sea and started moving toward the current no-oil-in-the-water philosophy. Port-state control would also begin to emerge from this period as a counter to the explosion in flags providing minimal oversight - the Paris MOU on PSC was established in this period. The Paris MOU started from a proposal to monitor labor standards onboard flags of convenience in 1978 and then expanded to vessel safety in 1982 after pressure from, you guessed it, the Amoco Cadiz spill.
Safety catches up, eventually
Supership does not end on a high note - the description of tank inspection, ship condition, and oil pollution gives the book a very pessimistic ending. That safety reforms in the marine industry move slowly, and often only after major accidents, is an unfortunate reality. The accidents and problems covered in Supership did spur many innovations. Public outrage over oil spills -especially Amoco Cadiz - pushed the MARPOL 73/78 treaties forward. While the public eye was caught by the large spills from collisions and groundings, MARPOL 73/78 introduced segregated ballast tanks. This improved ocean health by removing pollution from tank washings being dumped at sea (while making outflow from accidental spills worse once the cargo block is breached). Targetting this less-visible but very important source of oil pollution is a real success of the IMO regulation. Inerting the atmosphere in tanks and using crude oil instead of seawater for tank washing were developed at Shell and BP. These refinements significantly improved safety around tank washing and virtually eliminated tank explosions when done correctly.
Mostert predicts the emergence of vessel traffic systems (VTS) when commenting on the congested traffic in the English Channel and around Cape Town. Such systems were, in fact, already being advanced during this time - Liverpool and Rotterdam having had shore-based radar observation facilities for decades by 1974. The U.S. was authorized by port-state law to require ships to adhere to VTS in 1972 after the collision of two oil tankers approaching San Francisco. Notably, the near collisions seen on Ardshiel are all open-ocean and primarily support the author’s concern about the training of flags-of-convenience seafarers. In 1978, IMO passed the first International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification, and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW) to begin to (slowly) raise the minimum crewing standards regardless of flag-state control. Revisions in 1995 and 2010 have further bolstered STCW.
The tanker industry’s experience with very large vessels would trigger several decades of ship structural research - indeed, many of the structural research developments in the 1990s were a direct result of the challenges seen in the 1970s-1980s in tankers. Spectral fatigue, fracture, ultimate strength, LRFD approaches, dynamic load approaches, and explicit design for structural performance in accidental limit states - in each of these areas, if you start working backward, you’ll run into research on or funded by the tanker industry. The Ship Structure Committee reports document a large part of this history. Eventually, class societies moved competition away from structural scantlings. IACS worked to harmonize assumptions underpinning rules, and the emergence of IMO-required goal-base standards and IACS’ Common Structural Rules put the structural design of large vessels on a defendable foundation.
Challenges still remain
In one sense, it is notable how many of the concerns Mostert raises had begun to be addressed before 1980. Certainly, port state control, MARPOL, and STCW all directly address the core concerns in the book, even if progress was slow. Cruise ship, containership, and LNG carrier all had their decade of rapid size growth after tankers. They were generally much more successful with their first generation of jumbo ships (with some problems at the margins - such as the progressive flooding of Emma Maersk). On the other hand, if freight rates had stayed so high, would action have been as quick? And many industries would not view a 15-year delta as “quick.” How, in the next boom, when constructing long-lived assets, do we make sure that we are not building regulations from the pieces of broken ships or polluted water?
Second, the problem of bad actors using the highly decentralized nature of the industry remains. Today, a member of the dark tanker fleet, the Pablo, remains afloat off Malaysia with her deck ripped off and three crew members dead from a tank explosion nearly 150 days ago, with no owner or insurer in sight to handle the situation (see Splash’s excellent coverage). Reports that another dark-fleet tanker, the Turba, recently went not-under-command for two days while near Indonesia have surfaced. If the dark fleet growth means the lessons from the 1970s are not applied, we may not be that far away from a return of much more oil in the water.
Mostert’s other central concern in the book is the disappearance of traditional (read Western) flags from the ocean with their supposed traditions of excellence. I’m very torn on this - half of what is missed is largely British officers in command of former-empire sailors who wait on them hand and foot like something out of Downton Abbey. This aspect we can leave astern for history. Mostert goes beyond this, commenting on the growing detachment of the sailor from the shore - longer voyages or contracts, remote ports far from city centers, and the loss of the visibility of the commercial marine fleet just as its use is exploding. Mostert is very familiar with the sea, having grown up when sailing was the only way to move around the world. This, of course, is entirely gone now. Cruising is leisure, so current cruise ship passengers do not experience the ocean as a place of commerce and transport. These trends have only gotten stronger since Supership appeared. Global trade has grown enormously, yet most are acutely unaware of how much of their life and prosperity is tied to the trade on the sea. The global fleet remains out of sight but highly functional. COVID’s disruption and Ever Given’s grounding temporarily raised awareness, but it seems to be fading out again. Thus, if Supership has a message for today, it is probably that in times of rapid change, we all need to watch what is happening in the ocean.