A zombie tanker appears in a port in northern China loaded with oil

The Singapore-flagged tanker EM Longevity made its last voyage almost three years ago after more than two decades at sea. Earlier this month, ship tracking data showed it arriving at a Chinese port loaded with crude and ready to be unloaded.

With the expansion of the dark fleet moving restricted oil around the world, new tactics are constantly emerging. So-called “zombie ships”, which impersonate legitimate but defunct vessels, are among the tools used by operators to evade tightening restrictions and manipulate the Automatic Identification System, or AIS, tracking system.

In this case, the EM Longevity was a very large crude carrier built in 2000. In December 2021, at the end of its life, records show it was sent to a scrap yard in Bangladesh.

But on September 23, a tanker bearing his ID number showed up at a terminal in Dalian in Liaoning Province. She then left that port, after partially unloading, and crossed the Yellow Sea to northeastern China. On Sunday, it docked at Yantai, a port city in Shandong province, according to ship tracking and satellite data.

Satellite image of the zombie ship docked at a terminal on the right side of the image in a port near Yantai, China

Past practices of the dark fleet would indicate that the Yantai vessel simply assumed the identity of the legitimate EM Longevity. However, it was not immediately possible to rule out the less likely option that the old tanker was resurrected from storage.

“Whether it’s the same ship or not, why would you want to reactivate a crude oil tanker that’s 24 years old?” said Jan Stockbruegger, researcher at the Ocean Infrastructure Research Group at the University of Copenhagen. “This looks like a ship that signals it’s legitimate just so it can sail under the radar.”

EM Longevity’s International Maritime Organization registration number does not indicate a current manager, owner or insurer in ship tracking databases, including Bloomberg. According to data from VesselTracker, a maritime information database, the tanker is now sailing under the flag of Eswatini. The landlocked African kingdom said hundreds of ships were using its flag without permission.

EM Longevity’s doppelganger bears other dark fleet hallmarks. It began sailing past the Strait of Hormuz in waters near Iran around Aug. 11, half-full of cargo, ship tracking data shows. For two days it sailed past Iran’s Kharg Island, which has an oil terminal, and stayed there for another three days before making its way through the Persian Gulf back to the Strait of Hormuz.

In the past two months, the zombie ship has passed Iran, through the Straits of Malacca, past Singapore to China.

By the end of the month, the loaded zombie ship had made its way through the Straits of Malacca, then past Singapore before heading north to China. By mid-September, the ship was in the Yellow Sea between Liaoning and Shandong provinces.

Sea Agility Pte, listed as EM Longevity’s previous manager of shipping databases including Equasis, did not respond to requests for comment by email or phone.

China’s so-called teapot refiners, many of them based in Shandong, have become almost dependent on cheaper crude from the sanctioned regimes in recent years, notably emerging as key buyers of Iranian oil. Iranian crude imports to China will hit a record 1.79 million barrels per day in September, Kpler data showed.

Photo: On the oil tanker Devon, a crew member prepares to transfer oil for shipment from Iran’s Kharq Island to India on March 23, 2018. Photo credit: Ali Mohammadi/Bloomberg.

Copyright 2024 Bloomberg.

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