Crude Oil on the Water: Tracking Tanker Flows with Claude and a Maritime API

Just after midnight UTC today, a 274-metre crude oil tanker called ALTURA slipped out of Novorossiysk, Russia's largest Black Sea crude export terminal. She's flagged to Sierra Leone at the time of this query, which tells you nothing about where she was built and almost nothing about who owns her. (Shadow fleet vessels re-flag frequently. ALTURA has had at least three names and flags since 2023.) At 163,750 deadweight tonnes, she's a Suezmax, designed to transit the Suez Canal fully loaded, carrying up to around a million barrels of crude. Right now she's somewhere south of Novorossiysk, heading for the Turkish Straits. You probably don't care about any of that. Unless you trade oil. If you do, that departure is a data point -- one of nine tankers that left Novorossiysk today alone, ranging from Suezmax crude carriers down to small coastal chemical tankers. Multiply by Primorsk, Ust-Luga, Al Jubail, and the rest of the world's export terminals, and you get the global crude supply pictu