Call it either a very precarious situation or the proverbial elephant in the room: hundreds of tankers that, as of next year, will not comply with the IMO and Marpol double hull regulations, and finite shipbreaking capacity. With the phase-out looming and tanker rates, well, having tanked, there are a school of analysts sitting behind their mahogany desks, scratching their heads and wondering why owners haven't taken the initiative to scrap their older units before the regulations requires them to. And this is an excellent point. By delaying the inevitable, owners of older ships are compounding an already over-supplied tanker market today while leaving shipbreakers to deal with a massive influx of ships to break in 2010. But, a debt free ship making a dollar is still making a dollar.
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