Switching Costs

Switching costs can be divided into two categories: switching from dirty to clean and clean to dirty. The switch from clean to dirty is quite a simple process. As described in Energy Institute (2009) thorough draining of the tanks, necessary to avoid chemical reactions, has to be conducted even when switching from clean to dirty. This is the minimum cleaning that has to be done in any case of cargo change. Hence it is as a sunk cost (Energy Institute, 2009).

Industry Expert Ulf Bäcklund (2015) described the cost of switching from clean to dirty as virtually zero. We will follow this suggestion.

However, theory on the challenges and cost of switching from dirty to clean is scarce and circumstantial. Tanks and pipes have to be thoroughly cleaned to avoid pollution of the next cargo. This cleaning process takes time and chemicals. Thereafter, charterers usually demand three voyages with ‘mainly clean’ products to assure an inerrant transition process (Stopford, 2009). As this restricts the cargo menu, these three voyages are expected to be rewarded at a discount. Therefore cost of switching resembles from expenses for cleaning, opportunity cost of cleaning, a possible difference in the cost of operations and a possible opportunity cost incurred by restrictions on cargo after the cleaning process.

In contact with industry experts, estimations for switching costs were ranging widely. Ulf Bäcklund, head of Stena Bulk in Singapore, estimated the total cost of the switching process to be around 500,000 to a million dollars for an LR2 (Bäcklund, 2015). Platts reports quoted another insider on cleaning costs of 350,000 dollars plus 250,000 dollars in discount on follow-up voyages. The cleaning time ranged from seven days to three weeks (Wang &

Mohindru 2015a, 2015b)

Two articles by Johnson (2010, 2011) gave valuable insight into the cleaning process, its prerequisites, measurements of cargo contamination and actual estimation of cleaning costs.

He shows that especially for modern product tankers the difficulties and costs of a switch from dirty to clean seem to be overestimated through historical bias. He argues that costs of cleaning could be significantly reduced and proposes, a more risk affine behavior of owners in switching negotiations with charterers could be of significant benefit.

Johnson (2011) comes up with concrete estimates for the cleaning cost of a 75k dwt DNV ETC (Easy Tank Cleaning) classified product tanker. The report argues that the cleaning process is often overestimated, and hence too much time, effort and resources are dedicated to it. He estimates that costs of a conventional cleaning process (not including the discount on follow-up voyages) to be about 137,000 dollars. Taking into account the marginal benefit of cleaning and the degree of dilution when refilling the cargo tanks these costs could be reduced to only about 76,000 dollars for the same tanker specifications. Additionally, the current legislation states that the owner is responsible for the cleaning of the tanks and hence fully responsible in case of pollution or loss of the cargo. Consequently, if experience would show that tank-cleaning effort could be reduced at no danger of polluting the cargo, the owner might well be willing to take that risk. Moreover, it is estimated that one voyage with

“mainly clean” cargo would be sufficient to fully assure an inerrant transition process (Johnson, 2011). Assuming that cleaning costs are proportional to size of the vessel, the cleaning costs for in Aframax vessel of 115k dwt would have to be about 1.5 times higher.

Industry experts, such as Alexander Donger (2015) from the Tanker Department of Hanseatic Unity Chartering estimate the difference in cost of operations to a few hundred dollars (Donger, 2015). Sødal et al. (2008) stated that the differences in operating cost are already reflected in the net freight rate. Regardless of this, applying a net freight rate to a different vessel, as done in our case might lead to flaws. As we assume these to be negligible however, we set the difference on operating costs to zero.

The discount on following the voyages after the switch from dirty to clean stems from transitional cargos, which have to be transported to assure a clean voyage history of the vessel. Charterers are hesitant to accept a vessel in the clean market if the last three cargos have not been clean or ‘mainly clean’. Hence after the cleaning process three voyages with

‘mainly clean’ cargos, such as fuel oil have to be done. These are likely to be rewarded at a discount. The size of that discount is tough to measure. Logical estimation however leads us to believe that the rate attained for the first three voyages after cleaning will not be lower than the dirty rate.

On the basis of this rather ambiguous information, we will perform a sensitivity analysis on the switching cost. We will take the different estimates as possible scenarios, showing the effect on option value. These cost scenarios are shown in Table 5.3. In the base case we assume a cleaning cost according to Wang & Mohindru (2015) of 350,000 dollars and an

additional discount of 250,000 dollars. In the two Johnson cases, we adjusted for the difference in size plus a discount on three voyages for the high case and a discount of one voyage in the low case⁵. The range up to a million is based on the spread of the other sources we encountered.

Cleaning!Costs! Scenario! Total!Cost!

Full!Sample!

Base'Case' 600,000'

Johnson'High' 460,000'

Johnson'Low' 200,000'

High' 1,000,000'

Table'5.3'Cleaning'Cost'Scenarios'

5.4 Miscellaneous

The base case discount rate is set at 10 percent per annum, which corresponds to estimations in previous academic literature of Sødal et al. (2008) and Bjerknes & Herje (2013). This rate is based on an estimated expected return of 5 percent and an expected depreciation rate of 5 percent applying to an expected lifetime of the vessel of 20 years. The discount rate is highly cyclical which is why we decided to apply different scenarios from 5 percent till 15 percent in 2.5 percent increment steps to the full sample to picture the effect of the discount rate.

The value of the current differential p0 is set at the long-run mean of the sample, as the expected freight rate differential at any point in time is its long-run mean.

5 !"#ℎ = 137000 ∗^!!"_!" + 250000; !"# = 75000 ∗^!!"_!" +^!"####_!