Updated 2026-10-01 23:02 UTC
Tanker Watch
A satellite and AIS watch on the anchorages and lanes where oil tankers gather. Every six hours the pipeline checks for new Sentinel-2 passes, counts the vessels it can see, checks AIS where receivers reach, and publishes the result here. Each tile gets a new pass every few days, cloud permitting.
Chokepoints
What Tanker Watch does
Commercial ship-tracking services sell vessel positions built from dense networks of AIS receivers. Tanker Watch takes a different, open route. It reads free Sentinel-2 satellite imagery over a fixed set of anchorages, proposes the vessels it can see, and labels each one by shape and deck colour. Where an open AIS feed covers the same water, satellite detections can be checked against ships that identify themselves; the rest are vessels that were present but not broadcasting to any receiver we can read.
The result is not a global fleet count. It is a consistent, repeatable sample of places that matter to oil supply, published with its limits stated, so changes over time can be read honestly.
Open data
The latest snapshot is free to download as CSV or JSON, together with EIA price history. Please credit fxpm-labs.com when you reuse it.
How to read these numbers
- Counts are automatic proposals from 10-metre Sentinel-2 imagery. The detector is not a validated classifier: a “likely tanker” is a hull whose shape and deck colour fit a tanker, not an identified ship.
- Cloud-covered water is not searched. A low count under cloud is missing data, not an empty anchorage.
- Each tile is a sample about 12 kilometres across. Scenes arrive every few days per tile, so “latest” can mean several days old. The capture time is shown on every card.
- Vessels seen by satellite carry no names. Matching them with AIS needs a receiver in range at the same time.
Method and source details are on the sources page of the map. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data.