The next case study and last case study, I called the Whole Hog. Short-haul, long-haul, backhauls, regional, interregional, different cargo grades, this ship really has seen it all. Over nearly three quarters, these combinations yielded a 20% premium to the market. This is about combining voyages creatively, but it is also about just timing the market. talked about volatility at the start, and our market consists of many mini cycles. Like the macro cycle, which plays out over years, these mini cycles can play out over a number of weeks, days and sometimes even hours. Again, back to how I described our commercial strategy at the start, it is about being very targeted depending on where we are in those mini cycles. Of course, we cannot accomplish these results on every voyage, but enough for it to make a difference.
I also want to avoid sending the wrong message here. Ballast reduction is not an objective in itself. The real objective is TCE optimization. There are times when reducing ballast goes hand-in-hand with achieving the optimal TCE. But there are also times where we might forego certain cargoes and accept about is to take advantage of a hot market, especially during times of extreme arbitrage in commodity markets as we have been experiencing. This can create more inefficiency in the market, which we can benefit from. But key message just to repeat, our game is not about ballast reduction as such, it is about maximizing TCE. We don’t have to go hand in hand. This concludes my tool of our commercial platform. I will now provide a brief market outlook, but I promise there will be a few more maps.
Post topical, of course, the EU embargo on Russia. Slide 30. This is a really important slide here. We are using data from commodity platform Vortexa here. On the left, crude exports from Russia. On the right, diesel exports from Russia. You can see on the left that even before the EU crude embargo came into effect, self sanctioning had already started. EU and G7 countries started to decrease their oil purchases from Russia, well ahead of time, the blue bars. The diesel on the right-hand side, this is not the case. As a matter of fact, there was a buying spree leading right up to the winter. So the diesel story is actually yet to play out. It is an evolving situation and the EU ban just came into effect last week. Therefore, there is little hard data as such.
But of course, there is the immediate reality of how clean freight markets have reacted, and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence as of last week as well. Really important to note in this context is that Russia essentially only has two buyers for their crude oil, China and India. Now this does not make for a great bargaining position. But diesel, there are more countries to accept and within those countries, there are also more receivers. So lots more buyers for Russian diesel than for Russia’s crude oil. Russia, it is a lot more attractive instead of exporting crude oil to put their crude through refinery first and then export it as diesel and step. We don’t run crude tankers here at Ardmore, and I don’t want to comment too much on the crude market.
But the point here is that the diesel story is quite differentiated and still to play out. It is not a single event. It’s a structural fundamental shift of refined product supply chains globally. Another important insight from the oil analyst from Vortexa is that it’s very easy to have television right now and to only focus on diesel. Of course, refiners are doing the utmost to optimize their product slate for diesel production. But this comes at the expense of gasoline and naphtha production. This could create price pressure for gasoline and naphtha. This will kick over the next long-haul arbitrage with the obvious positive impact on tanker demand. Road traffic is globally on the rise still as is aviation demand. The world cannot live on diesel alone, something we pay close attention to.
