TD3C

TD3C is the Baltic Exchange's benchmark dirty tanker route for very large crude carriers: a 270,000-tonne voyage from Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia to Ningbo in China, quoted in Worldscale points. It is read alongside the Brent-Dubai EFS and the Baltic Dirty Tanker Index as a correlated system, with the EFS the upstream demand signal, TD3C the freight expression and BDTI the aggregate dirty tanker read.

A cargo fixed on the route on 17 July paid a quarter more to move than one fixed a fortnight earlier, at WS372 against the WS293.89 rate charged on 3 July, the lane's first real repricing since the IRGC's vessel strikes and the CENTCOM raid reached the Gulf earlier that week. War-risk hull cover on the same route widened that day to a range of 3-10% of hull value, adding directly to what a shipper pays to load crude at Ras Tanura and discharge it at Ningbo. That repricing closed a five-week gap between what the route charged and the physical risk already visible in the Brent-Dubai EFS and Russian diesel cracks, though hire on the lane remained well short of May's WS458.75 peak.

The softening from that May peak tracked a demand collapse rather than easing risk: Chinese seaborne crude imports fell to a near-decade low in May and Japan's April imports crashed 66%. Even so, the fourth-quarter 2026 forward freight agreement held near $181,163 a day through 22 June, roughly twice the US Gulf-China equivalent, moving neither on the 18 June US-Iran memorandum nor Iran's 20 June re-closure of the strait, signalling traders expect the Gulf corridor to stay structurally dearer than The Atlantic basin through the rest of 2026.