Shipping Economics: Freight Rates, Bunker Costs & Time-Charter Equivalent

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn the distances and speeds of a ballast and a laden leg into sea days, add a weather margin and port time to get the voyage duration, and find the speed a charterer's arrival date requires.
• Estimate the daily fuel burn at each leg's speed with the cube rule, the tonnes of VLSFO and MGO for the voyage, the bunker bill and the bunker cost per tonne of cargo.
• Build the port disbursement account for the load and discharge ports, calculate canal dues on a tiered net-tonnage tariff and add up the port and canal costs of the voyage.
• Turn freight, commissions and voyage costs into the voyage result, divide it by the voyage days to get the TCE and compare it with a time-charter offer.
• Calculate the sea days, daily burn, fuel cost and TCE of the voyage at nine speeds from 10 to 14 knots, find the speed with the highest TCE and chart the curve.
• Work out when laytime started, how much laytime the charter party allows, how much was used after the excluded periods, and the demurrage or despatch payable.
• Convert boxes into TEU, measure the utilisation of each leg, calculate the cost per TEU carried and the break-even utilisation of the round voyage.
• Convert the voyage's fuel into CO₂, measure the carbon intensity in grams per tonne-mile and estimate what an illustrative carbon price adds to the voyage cost and per day.