“Fewer owners are willing to take their vessels into the Middle East and those that do demand a premium for the service,” said Anoop Singh, a tanker analyst for Braemar ACM, a shipping services company. Adding to shipowners’ anxieties over security of crews and cargo, insurance premiums were also rising. Coverage for a one way, seven-day supertanker charter has soared by about 15% in recent days, shipowners and brokers said. Some 70 large crude carriers, or 10% of the world’s supertanker fleet, were in and around the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, brokers said, a normal amount. What was different was that some of them were idled as they awaited business. More than a third of the world’s shipped oil passes through the waterway, which connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman. A spokesman for Heidmar Inc., one of the world’s largest tanker operators, told The Wall […]