Adding another layer, the chemical sector, a market we actively participate in is poised for substantial growth as well. This is attributed to the significant petrochemical capacity set to come online in Asia over the coming years. In summary, then these robust long-term demand drivers point to continued strength in the product and chemical tanker markets. Moving to Slide 28, supply, matrix on the left provides a visual of the evolution indeed the tightening of tonnage supply in our industry. The two dimensions are average age of the fleet, size of the order book. If you looked at the top left, the quadrant in red, about 15 years ago, we were looking at a fleet that was already very modern plus a very large order book. As the years progressed, follow the progression there, the order book declined and fleet age increased.
Today, we are on the opposite side of the matrix. In the green quadrant on the bottom right, a low order book and the fleet on the water is the oldest it has been in two decades. Looking at the graph on the right, the current product tanker order book stands at 13% of the existing fleet. The MR order book is under 8% of the existing fleet. In five years, nearly half of the global fleet will be older than 20 years of age. Yes, there are some niche markets for older ships to operate in. However, the capacity of these niche markets is far too limited to absorb what is essentially 50% of today’s MR market. There are only 8 million deadweight tonnes on order for MRs. 55 million deadweight tonnes will be within the scrapping age profile in the next five years.
So by order of magnitude, 7 times the amount of deadweight capacity could potentially be scrapped compared to what is on order today. As we mentioned on our last earnings call, it is important to point out the impact that Aframax crude tankers have on the overall product tanker order book. Currently Aframax crude tankers, their net fleet growth is forecast at near zero. This implies that an increasing proportion of LR2s most likely older vessels will naturally transition to trading crude to cover the shortfall in Aframax tankers. And we are already seeing a clear trend today of LR2s shifting into dirty trades. Turning to Slide 29 this pulls it all together. We can see from the green bars in this chart the strong forecast from tonne-mile, long-term demand fundamentals 2024 enhanced by the full year impact of the EU embargo and then the further uplift from the Red Sea disruptions.
Contrast, we can see the limited net fleet growth across product and chemical tankers indicated by the gray and blue bars. Closing out then I want to reemphasize the clear contrast of low net fleet growth with the escalating tonne-mile projections. This gap is setting the stage for continued market strength and resilience. Turning to Slide 31, I will now demonstrate how some of these market drivers are reflected in the way we trade our ships. Essentially, what we do evolves around three key themes. One, fully capturing these very firm markets. Two, embracing the increasingly complex nature of our business environment, and unlocking the opportunities this creates for a company like Ardmore. And finally, building value through creative spread plays, adding incremental profitability on top of prevailing market levels.
Turning to Slide 32, this is a snapshot of our global setup across time zones covering our key markets in the Americas, in Europe and in Asia. This enables us to engage a broad and diverse range of high quality customers, a selection of them can be found here. Importantly, we are also engaging with and trading with an increasing number of chemical, agricultural and other non-petroleum focused companies. Ultimately, this is about having lots of trading options for Ardmore to ensure we can capture these strong markets in the most optimal way, both in terms of timing and voyage combinations. Turning to Slide 33, here are now some examples of what is achievable in these markets. These are actual voyages we have undertaken in recent months. Starting on the right hand side, you can see a long haul Asia to Europe voyage.
The original routing is shown as the red dotted line. As repeated ship attacks unfolded in the Red Sea last December, we negotiated a cape routing option, which we subsequently exercised. The incremental fuel cost and time was fully priced in to maintain our TCE despite the longer route. At the same time, we can see an example on the left of how we are servicing the Pacific markets from Asia. In addition to the original voyage leg from Asia to Mexico, we found lucrative onward employment options that were combined in a creative way. We achieved a strong TCE of $36,000 a day over 4.5 months and the vessel was laden much of the time. As you can see in both examples, duration of voyages originating in Asia is extended drastically, both due to the disruption in the Panama Canal and in the Red Sea.
The impact this has had on Asia-Pacific freight is notable. The box at the bottom right there shows freight movements since the start of the attacks in the Red Sea and the following escalation. Realized TCE on these routes essentially doubled from seasonally already high levels around $30,000 a day to now $60,000 a day. Just to mention about 65% of our fleet is trading currently in the Eastern regions. Turning to Slide 34, idle days and ballast days or you could say empty voyage legs are expensive, especially in this market. Let’s look at an interesting combination we have done on one of our chemical tankers, essentially reducing all ballast over half a year. These ships are half the size of our MRs, but they are more versatile in terms of carrying non-petroleum cargoes, and they can then be combined in lucrative ways.
Starting at the bottom left of the map in Argentina with a long laden leg into South Korea, followed by a China run into Europe, followed by Europe to the U.S. Then from there back to South America, a full circle, earning close to $30,000 a day over six months with only negligible ballast and 95% laden days. Again, these ships have half the intake of an MR. Turning to Slide 35, once more this slide shows what is possible in this market. As Bart mentioned earlier, we had a large number of dockings this past year. Typically, the way we trade our ships is all about maximizing flexibility and maximizing optionality. When you are positioning for drydock, you’re working towards very defined place and time. Doing this in a sensible way is both an art and a science.
In this example, we’re looking at a vessel that was opened in Northern Europe earlier last year. As you can see, we wanted to bring it to China for drydock. We put together a repositioning plan and combined a Transatlantic voyage with a U.S. Gulf to South America run. This was followed by a South America export cargo that brought the ship within [indiscernible] drydock location. Also here we see a 4:1 laden to ballast ratio and more importantly, a TCE close to $40,000 a day over four months. These are incredible earnings in their own merit, and truly remarkable when you consider these were really repositioning voyages. Now, the examples I’ve just shown you were only three examples of a much larger data set, yet, we hope they demonstrate to you some of the key themes we have been dealing with commercially.
And of course, in aggregate, all this will show up positively in our TCE results. Turning to Page 36. Here, I would like to show you one important way of how we have created additional value on top of a strong market. In this case, through a high performing time charter book and spread place. Allow me to explain what we are looking at here. The green line is the spot market. The bars in blue are the number of ships we have on time charter out. The bars in gray are the number of ships we have time charter in. While the world was still on lockdown during the COVID pandemic, the need for mobility was limited. Product tanker markets were weak. During that time, we benefited from strong time charter coverage at one point up to seven ships. At the same time, we started to execute some attractive time charters in with forward optionality.
When markets started to recover, the number of ships we had on time charter increased, the number of ships we had on time charter in increased, and we let our time charters out expire. This was near perfect timing as you can see, we pivoted from a more defensive stance in 2022 – we pivoted from a more defensive stance in 2021, when times were bad to really opening up our charter portfolio in 2022 to fully capture the market strength that has ensued since. For another example, this past summer we extended one of our chartered in vessels for min 12 max 18 months in our option. We continue to trade her spot for about half a year to capture the strength of the past winter market. Then we recently locked her in for a 12 month period to cover the remaining charter period, including the optional period.
The guaranteed profit spread on these 12 months alone was $2.7 million. So on top of the previous high spot earnings of the previous high spot earnings. We also want to mention that we hold in the money call options for time charter extensions, specifically time charter in extensions. Those are declarable later this year on three ships for charter periods until mid-2025. The option rates are at less than half of today’s actual spot earnings. Therefore, we believe these options will still be very much in the money by the time they’re due. At the current market levels, these three options will create additional value of $17 million. So do stay tuned. It is important to note that we were able to create these structures in both weak and strong markets.
Slide 37, this is the team. Strong markets are great, but you need the right team and the right platform to capture them. A very diverse team, as Bart pointed out, it’s diverse by design because we know that diverse teams create stronger performance, diverse in terms of cultural background, professional background, personality, and diverse along other dimensions. This enables better decision making and better access to our global markets, hence better performance. Our trading mantra is rooted in a nimble yet methodical approach to our ever changing markets, leveraging both experience factors as well as a suite of digital Intel tools and AI supported performance optimization systems. We believe that any market or any voyage for that matter, offers infinite opportunities for incremental performance gains in our whole system, and how we are approaching things philosophically is set up to capture that.
This concludes my section. Thank you for your attention and I look forward to answering your questions later. Back to Tony.
Anthony Gurnee: Thanks, Gernot. That lunch really looks and smells good. All we got was a ham sandwich. Great. Well, listen, we’ve gone through a lot of detail now and what I want to do actually is kind of zoom out quite a ways and think a little bit about where we are in the cycle. So forgive the really dumb imagery here, but it’s a serious question. I think it’s one of the most important questions as investors that you face looking at this sector. So I started in this business in the late 80s as a banker and since then anybody that’s been around that long I think some of the room have will count it up and think, yes, actually we’ve been through six cycles. When I started as a banker, back when banks actually went money and so we were taking real risk and we were looking back a couple of cycles.
