Bulk Carrier - Fleet Characteristics

Fleet Characteristics

The world's bulk transport has reached immense proportions: in 2005, 1.7 billion metric tons of coal, iron ore, grain, bauxite, and phosphate was transported by ship. Today, the world's bulker fleet includes 6,225 ships of over 10,000 DWT, and represent 40% of all ships in terms of tonnage and 39.4% in terms of vessels. Including smaller ships, bulkers have a total combined capacity of almost 346 million DWT. Combined carriers are a very small portion of the fleet, representing less than 3% of this capacity. The lake freighters of the Great Lakes, with 98 ships of 3.2 million total DWT, despite forming a small fraction of the total fleet by tonnage and only operating 10 months a year, carried a tenth of the world's bulk cargo because of the short trip distance and fast turnarounds.

As of 2005, the average bulker was just over 13 years old. About 41% of all bulkers were less than ten years old, 33% were over twenty years old, and the remaining 26% were between ten and twenty years of age. All of the 98 bulkers registered in the Great Lakes trade are over 20 years old and the oldest still sailing in 2009 was 106-years old.