You landlubbers can't deny
That when a ship sails in with an itty, bitty tug
And a round thing in your....ahem...don't know where that came from, moving on.
From gCaptain:
File photo shows the ULCC TI Europe, one of two 3 million barrel capacity oil tankers currently in the world. Photo: Euronav
Belgian tanker company Euronav has purchased the Ultra Large Crude Carrier Seaways Laura Lynn, making it the proud owner of the only two ULCCs in the world capable of holding up 3 million barrels of oil.
Euronav Tankers acquired the Seaways Laura Lynn from Oceania Tanker Corporation, a subsidiary of International Seaways, for $32.5 million.
Euronav has renamed the ULCC ‘Oceania’ and re-registered it under the Belgian flag.
The Seaways Laura Lynn was built in 2003 and has a deadweight of a whopping 441,561 metric tons. The vessel measures 380 meters in length and 68 meters in beam, with a draft of 24 meters.
The only other ULCC currently in the world is Euronav’s 442,470 dwt TI Europe.Big yes but still nothing like the ones the Japanese and French built back in the day.
The two remaining ULCCs were among a series of four TI-class supertankers built in 2002-2003 by DSME for Hellespont Group of Greece. Euronav acquired the vessels in 2004, but later sold one (Overseas Laura Lynn) to Oceania Tanker Corporation in March 2015. The two other vessels in the series have since been converted to Floating Storage and Offloading (FSO) vessels and remain under the ownership Euronav subsidiaries....MORE
From February's Big Boats: "Switzerland's Allseas plans world's largest construction vessel"
...Pioneering Spirit measures 382 x 124 meters and is calculated at 403,342 gross tonnage. Note that gross tonnage is a calculation of enclosed volume times a multiplier and is not deadweight tonnage.
For that measure we go back to a different 2017 post, "Frontline Boss On Oil: "Fredriksen Expects Rise In Storage Of Oil On Tankers" (FRO)":
...Whenever you see the market with enough contango to make the cash-and-carry storage trade worthwhile I think of this sucker (now broken for scrap):
Built by Sumitomo
Capacity: 4,240,865 barrels o'crude.
From the Wikipedia page:
Here's how it stacked up against some other big boats (and buildings):...Seawise Giant, later Happy Giant, Jahre Viking, Knock Nevis, Oppama, and finally Mont, was a ULCC supertanker that was the longest ship ever built. It possessed the greatest deadweight tonnage ever recorded. Fully loaded, its displacement was 657,019 tonnes (646,642 long tons; 724,239 short tons), the heaviest ship of any kind, and with a laden draft of 24.6 m (81 ft), it was incapable of navigating the English Channel, the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal. Overall, it was generally considered the largest ship ever built. It was sunk during the Iran–Iraq War, but was later salvaged and restored to service. It was last used as a floating storage and offloading unit (FSO) moored off the coast of Qatar in the Persian Gulf at the Al Shaheen Oil Field....MORE
And in a third measurement of size, January 2014's:
Natural Gas: Shell Launches The Largest Vessel Ever Built (displacement larger than six aircraft carriers) RDS
And we're not talking little French aircraft carriers either.
From Lloyd's:
Lloyd's covers largest ever floating vessel...
*****
... Giving the French their due, they are planning on building Porte-Avions 2 - "aircraft carrier 2", using the plans for the future Queen Elizabeth class ships that perfidious Albion is cooking up.Project Canceled, 15 July 2013
And again giving the French a tip of the old chapeau they did build these monsters:
Batillus class tanker, 555,000 DWT.