Zombie Tanker Turns Up at Northern Chinese Port Laden With Oil

Singapore-flagged oil tanker EM Longevity made its final 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 discharge.

With the expansion of the dark fleet moving restricted oil around the world, new tactics are constantly emerging. So-called “zombie vessels”, which assume the identity of legitimate but defunct ships, are among the tools used by operators to circumvent tightening restrictions and to 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 useful life, records show it was sent to a scrapyard in Bangladesh.

But on Sept. 23, a tanker bearing its identity number showed up at a terminal in Dalian in Liaoning province. It then left that port, having partially unloaded, and sailed across the Yellow Sea in China’s northeast. 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-hand side of the image, at a port near Yantai, China

Past dark fleet practices would indicate the vessel in Yantai simply took on the identity of the broken-up, legitimate EM Longevity. It was not immediately possible, however, to exclude the less likely option that the old tanker was resurrected from the scrapyard.

“Regardless of 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, a research fellow at the University of Copenhagen’s Ocean Infrastructure Research Group. “This seems like a vessel that’s signaling that it’s legitimate just so that it can sail under the radar.”

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

The EM Longevity’s doppelganger bears other hallmarks of the dark fleet. It started to sail past the Straits of Hormuz into the waters near Iran around Aug. 11, half full of cargo, ship-tracking data show. For two days it sailed on to a spot 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 toward the Straits of Hormuz.

Over the last two months, the zombie vessel has sailed past Iran, through the Straits of Malacca, past Singapore to reach China.

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

Sea Agility Pte, listed as EM Longevity’s previous manager on 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 all but reliant on less expensive crude from sanctioned regimes in recent years, emerging in particular as key buyers of Iranian oil. Imports of Iranian crude into China are set to reach a record high of 1.79 million barrels per day in September, data from Kpler show.

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