An oil tanker, known as a petroleum tanker as well, is a merchant ship designed for bulk oil transportation. Today, oil tankers fall into two basic categories, crude tankers and product tankers.
Crude tankers are the larger of the two. They move raw, unrefined oil from places where it is pumped out of the earth, to the refineries, where it is processed into fuel and other products.
Product tankers, on the other hand, are much smaller than crude tankers and move already-processed petroleum products to markets where those products can be sold and used.
In order to maximize profits, corporations are always seeking the most efficient way to achieve their goals. Because of the immense size that the oil tankers have, they provide an easy and inexpensive way to transport oil over long distances.
Similar to many other influential technologies, oil tankers have helped us progress as a civilization, but also they have presented us with considerable problems.
Many of us take the mobility all around the worlds for granted, but without the oil tanker it would be impossible to have this pleasure.
In spite of the opportunities that they give for the mobility in the world, some of the worst man-made environmental disasters are resulted after oil tanker accidents polluting waterways and coast areas.
Video: Engineering Channel
The oil tanker’s classification is made by their size and also by their occupation. The classes by the size range from inland or coastal tankers of a few thousand metric tons of deadweight (DWT) to 550,000 DWT of the mammoth ultra large crude carriers (ULCCs).
Oil Tankers transfer about 2,000,000,000 metric tons (2.2×109 short tons) of oil per year.
There is an evolvement in some specialized types of oil tankers. One of these type is the naval replenishment oiler, which can fuel a moving vessel. The ore-bulk-oil carriers and the permanently moored floating storage units are the other two variations on the standard oil tanker design.
Oil-tankers are subject to stringent design and operational regulations, because of their involvement in a huge number of damaging and high-profile oil spills.