CommodityScope Voyage Routes Methodology

1. Scope

This document records Voyage Routes methodology version 1.0. It does not retrospectively assign a new effective date to earlier publications. Parent document: CommodityScope Assessment & Publication Framework (/methodology/core).

Voyage Routes is a model methodology for maritime route geometry. It names the load and discharge reference ports, determines one-way steamer miles, records emission-control exposure and states whether the chosen path uses a canal. It is not a tanker freight assessment family and it does not construct a CommodityScope Assessment Range.

What this methodology publishes

A published Voyage Route is a CommodityScope Modelled Indicator for one clean or dirty tanker trade lane with two named reference ports. The published figures are one-way laden and ballast distances in nautical miles, the corresponding emission-control distances, and canal-use flags for that path.

Outside this methodology

Clean tanker freight assessments (/methodology/clean-tanker), dirty tanker freight assessments (/methodology/dirty-tanker), marine-fuel assessments (/methodology/bunker) and Voyage TCE (/methodology/tce) remain in their own families or model methodologies. LPG, barge, dry-bulk and Cape-routing freight variants are outside Voyage Routes 1.0 unless a later version admits them.

2. What Voyage Routes 1.0 Is

Voyage Routes 1.0 converts a named pair of CommodityScope reference ports and a stated canal policy into published steamer miles and emission-control geometry.

The published result is a CommodityScope Modelled Indicator. It is not a fixture, a charter-party distance, a surveyed invoice, a Worldscale flat rate or an earnings figure.

Voyage TCE 1.0 continues to use the distances stored on its own versioned route profiles. Later earnings models, including Voyage TCE 2.0, may read a published Voyage Route as the distance input. A change to Voyage Routes is not a tanker freight assessment change and is not a bunker assessment change.

3. Reference Ports

A Voyage Route is published only when both the load and the discharge reference ports are named. A regional basin is not treated as a port. Combined or unspecified discharges such as East, Far East, Northeast Asia or US Atlantic or Gulf Coast are not resolved by inference.

Where Voyage TCE 1.0 already named a reference port for a basin, Voyage Routes 1.0 reuses that port. Those accepted basin ports are Primorsk for the Baltic, Rotterdam for UK Continent and ARA, Augusta for the Mediterranean, Bonny for West Africa, Ras Tanura for the Arabian Gulf, Singapore, Yokohama for Japan, Ulsan for South Korea, Ningbo for China, Houston for the US Gulf Coast and Novorossiysk for the Black Sea.

Where the trade lane itself names a terminal — Ceyhan, Yanbu, Kozmino, Vancouver, Rotterdam, Singapore, Chittagong, Hound Point, Sidi Kerir, Houston or Antwerp — that name is the reference port.

An intra-regional lane that would collapse to the same terminal at both ends is not published until two distinct terminals are named. Gulf of Oman is not treated as Ras Tanura. Red Sea as a basin is not treated as Yanbu.

4. Routing Policy

The Kiel Canal is not a CommodityScope routing basis under Voyage Routes 1.0 and is blocked. The North-East Passage, the North-West Passage and the Corinth Canal are blocked.

The Suez Canal and the Panama Canal remain available when they are the shortest option under that policy. The published snapshot records whether the chosen path used Suez or Panama. A later earnings model may still withhold a route that uses a canal until a canal-cost assumption exists.

Danish Straits and Gibraltar are waypoints on an ocean track. They are not canal products and they do not receive an invented delay or cost in this methodology.

Ballast returns from the discharge reference port to the load reference port on the same path unless a later profile version states a different ballast track.

5. Distance Determination

One-way steamer distance and emission-control exposure are determined from a specialist maritime distances service applied to the named reference ports and the stated canal policy. CommodityScope selects the ports, the canal blocks and the emission-control treatment. Another routing table is not substituted for a missing determination.

The listed routing source for Voyage Routes 1.0 is Dataloy Distances. The published CommodityScope figure is the rounded steamer distance, not the raw routing-service print.

Routes are not steered away from emission-control areas, high-risk areas or ice in order to shorten the fuel or security story. The published path is the shortest remaining option after the canal policy is applied.

6. Published Figures

Published ocean miles are rounded to the nearest 50 nautical miles. Emission-control miles are the sum of in-zone steamer segments on that path, rounded to the nearest 50 nautical miles. Emission-control miles cannot exceed ocean miles.

A load or discharge port is recorded as inside an emission-control area when the published path starts or ends inside such an area. Mediterranean emission-control rules in force from May 2025 are included in that geometry.

A Voyage Route is not published when either reference port is unnamed, when the two ports are the same terminal, or when the routing service does not return a finite distance for the stated policy.

7. Use by Other Models

Voyage TCE (/methodology/tce) remains the earnings model. Marine-fuel assessments (/methodology/bunker) remain the fuel model. Voyage Routes supplies distances and emission-control geometry only.

Voyage TCE 1.0 is unchanged. It does not reread Voyage Routes snapshots and it does not republish earlier TCE values when a Voyage Route is later issued for the same lane.

A later earnings model may use a published Voyage Route as its distance input. Missing canal-cost assumptions, missing vessel profiles and missing fuel or freight inputs remain separate publication limits of that later model.

8. Corrections and Historical Integrity

A published Voyage Route retains its methodology version and reference-port pair. Later changes to ports, canal policy or rounding do not rewrite a prior published value. Those changes close the previous version and open a new one.

A data or coding error is corrected through the applicable correction mechanism while preserving audit history. A correction is not a new methodology version.

9. Publication Boundary

Reference-port assignment, canal policy, emission-control geometry and mile rounding are publication rules of this model. They are not applied to tanker freight midpoints, marine-fuel assessments, Voyage TCE 1.0 snapshots, tanker freight indices or delivered-cost models.

10. Important Notice

Voyage Route values published under this methodology are CommodityScope Modelled Indicators. They are analytical estimates of route geometry for market-intelligence purposes, not contractual distances, fixtures or settlement values, and they are not represented as a regulated benchmark.

Use is subject to the CommodityScope Assessment & Publication Framework and the CommodityScope Terms of Service.