Tankers The dramatic January 3 capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by US forces and Washington’s ongoing campaign to detain Venezuela‑linked tankers have begun to redraw the crude trade map, with far‑reaching implications for the tanker market. Over the past two months US forces detained and diverted seven tankers tied to Venezuelan trades, part of what the Trump administration has framed as a long‑term bid to control and rehabilitate the country’s oil sector. At the same time, Vitol and Trafigura have secured preliminary special licences to negotiate and export Venezuelan crude – the opening move in pulling barrels back from the grey fleet into mainstream logistics. “This marks the first step towards making Venezuelan barrels compliant,” SEB analysts told clients, forecasting that “the share of crude exports carried on shadow fleet tankers will decline rapidly as additional special licences are issued and compliant logistics are reinstated.” Allied Shipbroking argued that, from a shipping perspective, the transition should “reduce opacity and counterparty risk while preserving long‑haul Asia tonne‑mile demand in the near term.” Any later reorientation towards the US Gulf Coast, Allied warned, would shorten voyage distances, compress tonne‑miles and tilt demand towards aframaxes and LR1s at the expense of VLCCs. Kpler estimated that roughly 675,000 barrels per day currently moving on shadow vessels could ultimately migrate back to the commercial fleet under US control, “boosting aframax and suezmax demand while sharply worsening prospects for the shadow VLCC segment”. Braemar put Venezuela’s average 2025 exports nearer 800,000 barrels per day and said a full redirection to US Gulf refiners would be “transformative” for regional tonne‑miles. It calculated that aframax tonne‑miles on the Venezuela-US Gulf route could quadruple, implying about 26 extra aframax voyages per month on top of Chevron’s existing nine, taking monthly US Gulf‑bound Venezuelan aframax calls to around 43, excluding lightering. Higher Venezuelan runs in the US Gulf would likely displace Canadian barrels from local refineries, Braemar added, pushing those volumes onto longer‑haul aframax and potentially suezmax routes to India, China and Europe. In Asia, Chinese independents can initially lean on an estimated 70m barrels of Iranian, Russian and Venezuelan shadow crude in floating storage, but Braemar reckoned Chinese state‑owned refiners will eventually need to replace about 200,000 barrels per day of Venezuelan supply, potentially via extra Basrah Heavy VLCCs from Iraq or aframax flows of Canadian crude from the US west coast. Xclusiv Shipbrokers highlighted how the shift in flows could tighten effective supply even without a global deficit. “A marginal barrel moving US Gulf-North Asia travels far further than a Caribbean barrel cleared through a nearby blending hub,” it noted, adding that the upheaval is “widening the price gap between mainstream, fully‑compliant tonnage and grey‑trade candidates”. The Maduro operation, Xclusiv argued, showed how quickly geopolitics can change the operating layer for ships, with port calls slowing and charterers becoming “far less tolerant of paperwork gaps”. “Venezuela is tightening the definition of ‘tradable’ tonnage and rewarding cleanliness, flexibility and proven counterparties,” it concluded. Signal Ocean framed the reshuffle more as a redistribution than a pure supply shock. A pivot towards more regular Atlantic B