Very few of the companies that sell LNG own the ships that carry it, and very few of the companies that own the ships ever take title to a cargo. Chartering is the market that joins them, and its behaviour explains a good deal of why LNG prices move the way they do.
Time charter
The standard arrangement. An owner supplies a vessel with its crew, maintenance and insurance; a charterer pays a daily hire rate and directs where the ship goes.
Periods run from a few months to the twenty years that used to be typical when a ship was built against a specific project. A long time charter is what makes a newbuilding financeable: a yard slot and a hundred and fifty million dollars of debt are much easier to justify with two decades of contracted revenue behind them.
The division of costs matters. The owner bears the ship; the charterer bears the voyage, which includes fuel. Since a modern LNG carrier burns its own cargo, the vessel’s boil-off rate is directly a charterer’s cost, which is why it appears in the negotiation as a guaranteed figure rather than a technical footnote.
Spot charter
A single voyage at the market rate of the day.
Spot gives a trader flexibility, which is exactly what a portfolio player wants: the ability to lift a cargo when the arbitrage opens without owning a ship that sits idle when it does not. What it costs is exposure to a market that can price a day of shipping at a few tens of thousands of dollars or several hundred thousand, depending on how many ships are uncommitted that week.
Why the rate swings so hard
Three things combine, and each amplifies the others.
Supply is fixed in the short run. The fleet is small by the standards of any other shipping sector, and adding to it means a berth at one of the few yards capable of the work, several years out. No amount of demand produces a ship this quarter.
Demand is not steady. LNG demand is seasonal, weather-driven and occasionally political. A cold winter in north-east Asia, or a continent replacing piped supply at short notice, moves it a long way in weeks.
Voyage length changes effective supply. This is the one people miss. Because a ship’s earning capacity is round trips per year, cargoes shifting from short routes to long ones consume more ships for the same tonnage. A canal closure or a change in which basin buys from which seller can tighten the market without a single vessel leaving the fleet. The voyage cycle explains the mechanism.
The result is a rate that behaves less like a freight price and more like a commodity with no storage.
What a charter obliges
A charter party is a long document, and most of it exists for the awkward cases.
Speed and consumption are warranted: the ship will make a stated speed at a stated fuel burn, and shortfalls are compensated. Boil-off is guaranteed similarly. Off-hire suspends payment when the vessel cannot perform through the owner’s fault, which is why maintenance scheduling is contentious. Laytime allows a period for loading and discharge, with demurrage payable beyond it, so port congestion has a price attached.
Heel is negotiated too. The quantity retained on the ballast leg is cargo the charterer paid for, so who bears it and how much is required is a term rather than an operational decision.
Tolling is a different thing
Tolling gets discussed alongside chartering because the same companies do both in the same deal, but it is a liquefaction arrangement, not a shipping one.
Under a tolling agreement a customer delivers its own gas to a plant, pays a fee to have it liquefied, and keeps title to the molecules throughout. The plant owner takes no commodity price risk; the customer takes all of it, and also has to arrange the ship. Most US liquefaction is structured this way, which is why American cargoes arrive in the market unattached to a destination and helped create a genuine spot trade.
What this site holds
Charter data is commercial and largely private, and none of it is here. The carrier directory records the vessels themselves — owner, operator, yard, containment, capacity — from the tracker, and stops where the commercial arrangements begin.
Where an owner appears against both ships and terminals, the company pages show both, which is often the most visible trace of an integrated position that the public data allows.