Speaking to PIN, managing director of NIOTC, Mohammad Soori, emphasized: "This oil tanker with a capacity of 317,000 tons (2.1 million barrels) was ordered by the company according to a contract valued at 128 m dollars from South Korea."

He also stated: "There are 16 other oil tankers projects under construction and ordered by the NIOTC, expected to be completed and delivered to the country's fleet by 2011.

"This will raise the global status of Iran from 4th to 3rd ranking in terms of oil tanker possession," Soori said.

The NIOTC managing director said that at present the company possessed 45 vessels with a total capacity of 10.6 million tons (DWT) and added that the average life time of an oil tanker owned by the company is less than 6 years but the fleet is the youngest in the world.

At the same time the company’s capacity is ranked 4th in the world and considering the high percentage of ship construction orders of the future, the company intends to also upgrade its status in terms of capacity and average age of vessels in the world.

There are two basic types of oil tankers: the crude tanker and the product tanker. Crude tankers move large quantities of unrefined crude oil from its point of extraction to refineries. Product tankers, generally much smaller, are designed to move petrochemicals from refineries to points near consuming markets.

Oil tankers are often classified by their size as well as their occupation. The size classes range from inland or coastal tankers of a few thousand metric tons of deadweight (DWT) to the mammoth supertankers of 550,000 DWT. Tankers move approximately 2 billion metric tons of oil every year. Second only to pipelines in terms of efficiency, the average cost of oil transport by tanker amounts to only two or three United States cents per gallon.