According to the Bermuda daily, Royal Gazette, excess capacity in the global fleet of liquefied natural gas carriers will be at its highest this decade in 2008, due to a growing, worldwide fleet causing lower utilisation rates and it is predicted by analysts that utilisation of the LNG fleet will fall to 77.4 per cent in 2008, almost 13 percentage points lower than at the beginning of the decade.
Demand for LNG tankers has deteriorated markedly as a result of a large increase in fleet supply partly caused by speculative orders for new ships.