The history of the oil tanker is part of the evolution of the technology of oil transportation alongside the oil industry.
Background
The technology of oil transportation has evolved alongside the oil industry. Although use of oil reaches to prehistory, the first modern commercial exploitation of oils distilled from material extracted from the ground dates back to James Young's manufacture of paraffin (kerosene) in 1850.. In the early 1850s, oil began to be exported from Upper Burma, then a British colony. The oil was moved in earthenware vessels to the river bank where it was then poured into boat holds for transportation to Britain..
In the 1860s, the Pennsylvania oil fields became a major supplier of oil, and a center of innovation after Edwin Drake struck oil near Titusville, Pennsylvania. The first oil well in the United States was dug here in 1859, initially yielding around ten barrels per day.Woodman, 1975, p 175. Within two years, the Titusville field was providing .
The invention of oil refining led to the availability of kerosene as lamp oil, which has a smokeless combustion in contrast with the until then highly used whale oil. The lamp oil became known as Pennsylvania Kerosine. Due to overfishing, whale oil became rare and expensive. By this time, petroleum oil had already begun to supplant fish, whale, and vegetable oils for applications such as indoor and outdoor lighting, and transatlantic export had already begun.
Break-bulk boats and barges were originally used to transport Pennsylvania oil in wooden barrels. But transport by barrel had several problems. The first problem was weight: the standard empty barrel weighed , representing 20% of the total weight of a full barrel.Tolf, 1976, p. 54. Also barrels were leaky, and could only be carried one way. Finally, barrels were themselves expensive. For example, in the early years of the Russian oil industry, barrels accounted for half the cost of petroleum production.
Early oil tankers
The movement of oil in bulk was attempted in many places and in many ways. Modern oil pipelines have existed since 1860. The first oil tankers were two sail-driven tankers that were built in 1863 on England's River Tyne..
The first ocean-going oil-tank steamer, the Vaderland, was designed and built by Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company of the United Kingdom for the American-Belgian Red Star Line in 1873, although the vessel's use was soon curtailed by the authorities citing safety concerns.Woodman, 1975, p. 176. By 1871, the Pennsylvania oil fields were making limited use of oil tank barges and cylindrical railroad tank cars similar to those in use today. In 1877, the sailing ship Lindesnæs was converted to carry oil in bulk.
The modern oil tanker The modern oil tanker was developed in the period from 1877 to 1885. In 1876, Ludvig and Robert Nobel, brothers of Alfred Nobel, founded Branobel (short for Brothers Nobel) in Baku, Azerbaijan. It was, during the late 19th century, one of the largest oil companies in the world.
Ludvig Nobel was a pioneer in the development of early oil tankers. He first experimented with carrying oil in bulk on single-hulled barges. Turning his attention to self-propelled tankships, he faced a number of challenges. A primary concern was to keep the cargo and fumes well away from the engine room to avoid fires.Tolf, 1976, p. 55. Other challenges included allowing for the cargo to expand and contract due to temperature changes, and providing a method to ventilate the tanks.
Nobel's Zoroaster, built in 1878, was the world's first successful oil tanker. He designed this ship together with Sven Alexander Almqvist, who also built the vessel. The contract to build it was signed in January 1878, and it made its first run later that year from Baku to Astrakhan. The Zoroaster design was widely studied and copied, with Nobel refusing to patent any part of it. In October 1878 he ordered two more tankers of the same design: the Buddha and the Nordenskjöld.
Zoraster carried its of kerosene cargo in two iron tanks joined by pipes. One tank was forward of the midships engine room and the other was aft. The ship also featured a set of 21 vertical watertight compartments for extra buoyancy. The ship had a length overall of , a beam of , and a draft of . Unlike later Nobel tankers, the Zoraster design was built small enough to sail from Sweden to the Caspian by way of the Baltic Sea, Lake Ladoga, Lake Onega, the Rybinsk and Mariinsk Canals and the Volga River.
When W.A. Riedmann of Geestemünde entered the petroleum trade in 1877, he noted the difficulties of using barrels, and began to experiment with the former emigrant ships Adona and Derby, filling their large iron drinking water tanks with oil. In October 1879 he purchased the Andromeda at Liverpool, an 1,876-ton full-rigged composite ship built in 1864, brought it to Teklenborgs Werft, and added seventy iron tanks to the hold. The piping between the tanks was connected so that all could be filled from a single tank. The composite hull, with structural members of iron covered with wooden planking, was especially suitable for the addition of tanks, because they could be firmly fastened to the iron beams. Andromeda made seven trips from Germany to North America as a sailing oil tanker.
Nobel also began to adopt a single-hull design, where the ship's hull forms part of its tank structure. In November 1880 he ordered his first single-hulled tanker, the Moses. Within a year, he ordered seven more single-hulled tankers: the Mohammed, Tatarin, Bramah, Spinoza, Socrates, Darwin, Koran, Talmud, and Calmuck. Branobel experienced one of the first oil tanker disasters. In 1881 Zoroasters sister-ship, Nordenskjöld, exploded in Baku while taking on kerosene. The pipe carrying the cargo was jerked away from the hold when the ship was hit by a gust of wind. Kerosene then spilled onto the deck and down into the engine room, where mechanics were working in the light of kerosene lanterns. The ship then exploded, killing half the crew. Nobel responded to the disaster by creating a flexible, leakproof loading pipe which was much more resistant to spills.Tolf, 1976, p. 56.
In 1883, oil tanker design took a large step forward. Working for the Nobel company, British engineer Colonel Henry F. Swan designed a set of three Nobel tankers.Tolf, 1976, p. 58. Instead of one or two large holds, Swan's design used several holds which spanned the width, or beam, of the ship. These holds were further subdivided into port and starboard sections by a longitudinal bulkhead. Earlier designs suffered from stability problems caused by the free surface effect, where oil sloshing from side to side could cause a ship to capsize.Huber, 2001, p.5. But this approach of dividing the ship's storage space into smaller tanks virtually eliminated free-surface problems. This approach, almost universal today, was first used by Swan in the Nobel tankers Blesk, Lumen, and Lux.Turpin and McEven, 1980:8-24.
Others point to the , another design of Colonel Swan, as being the first modern oil tanker. It adopted the best practices from previous oil tanker designs to create the prototype for all subsequent vessels of the type. It was the first dedicated steam-driven ocean-going tanker in the world and was the first ship in which oil could be pumped directly into the vessel hull instead of being loaded in barrels or drums. It was also the first tanker with a horizontal bulkhead, its features included cargo valves operable from the deck, cargo main piping, a vapor line, cofferdams for added safety, and the ability to fill a ballast tank with seawater when empty of cargo.Woodman, 1975, p. 177. The ship was built in Britain and was purchased by Wilhelm Anton Riedemann, an agent for the Standard Oil Company along with several of her sister ships. After the Glückauf was lost in 1893 after being grounded in fog, Standard Oil purchased the sister ships.
In 1903, the Nobel brothers built two oil tankers which ran on internal combustion engines, as opposed to the older steam engines. The , the first diesel-electric ship, was capable of carrying of refined oil was powered by three diesel motors. The larger Sarmat employed four engines.Tolf, p. 172. The first seagoing diesel-powered tanker, 4,500-ton Mysl, was built by Nobel's competitors in Kolomna.Tolf, p. 173. Nobel responded with Emanuel Nobel and Karl Hagelin, kerosene tankers with engines..
The , seven-masted schooner , built in 1902, was the largest purely sail tanker ever built. It carried coal, and oil in barrels from Texas to the East Coast of the U.S. This schooner was fitted out as an oil tanker in 1906, and sunk in a storm off Isles of Scilly in December 1907.
Asian oil trade
The 1880s also saw the beginnings of the Asian oil trade. The oil industry in Azerbaijan was the largest producer in the world at that time, but was limited to the Russian market. John D. Rockefellers Standard Oil dominated the world market.
The idea that led to moving Russian oil to the Far East via the Suez Canal was the brainchild of two men: importer Marcus Samuel and shipowner/broker Fred Lane — the London agent for the De Rothschild Frères. Prior bids to move oil through the canal had been rejected by the Suez Canal Company as being too risky. Samuel approached the problem a different way: asking the company for the specifications of a tanker it would allow through the canal.
Armed with the canal companies specifications, Samuel had James Fortescue Flannery designing tankers for Bnito — the Russian oil company of the Rothschilds — and ordered three tankers from William Gray & Company in northern England. Named the Murex, the Conch and the Clam, each had a capacity of 5,010 long tons of deadweight. In 1893 the Samuel brothers founded the Tank Syndicate together with Fred Lane and Asian trading companies. In 1897 it was renamed Shell Transport and Trading company, forerunner of today's Royal Dutch Shell company.
With facilities prepared in Jakarta, Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Kobe, the fledgling Shell company was ready to become Standard Oil's first challenger in the Asian market. On August 24, 1892, the Murex became the first tanker to pass through the Suez Canal.
In the meanwhile, in 1890 the Koninklijke Nederlandsche Maatschappij tot Exploitatie van Petroleumbronnen in Nederlandsch-Indie (KNMEP) ("Royal Dutch Company for the Working of Petroleum Wells in the Dutch Indies") — part of Royal Dutch Petroleum — was founded. In 1892 it found oil near Pangkalan Brandan on Sumatra, just some months before Samuels kerosene arrived in Singapore. At first, chartered ships were used, but in 1896 KNMEP launched its first tankers, the Besitang and Berandan. The threat of the Tank Syndicate was reduced as the Dutch government excluded them from trading in the Dutch East Indies. To prevent a hostile takeover by Standard Oil, preference shares were issued.Devanney, 2006, p. 14-16. By the time Shell merged with Royal Dutch Petroleum in 1907, the company had 34 steam-driven oil tankers. Standard Oil started building tankers the same way as Shell and by 1900 owned around 60 tankers.