The Wall Street Journal reports that Stephen Colbert has fallen for MarineTraffic. On his Late Show, he told the audience that the tanker-tracking service is “the best app of all time.” Watching tiny blinking ships drift across a map of the Strait of Hormuz, he said, has become must-watch television.
Welcome to the club, Stephen. Some of us have been members since 2017.
Twenty bucks a month, for science
It started innocently. Vancouver was deep in the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion fight, and the central claim from the anti-tanker lobby was that a modest increase in oil shipments out of Burrard Inlet would cause certain catastrophe. One ship a day, we were told, was a maritime suicide pact.
I had a hunch the global picture told a different story. So I signed up for MarineTraffic at twenty dollars a month and started looking.
What I found inside that little app was a working planet. Tankers everywhere. Routes I’d never thought about. A maritime economy that the people most loudly opposing one tanker a day in Vancouver were either ignoring or had never bothered to examine in the first place.
Twenty dollars a month became fifty. Fifty became one hundred. Eventually I was paying around three hundred dollars a month for the premium tier – the one that lets you replay a tanker’s last few weeks of movement as an animation. That feature, more than any other, turned the data into stories. And stories travel. I’ve never had as much activity on my tweets before or since.
What the maps actually showed
A few highlights from the obsession years.
The Caribbean problem. Vancouver residents kept telling me – with absolute certainty – that one tanker a day would destroy tourism. So I pulled up the Caribbean. Snowbird heaven. Cruise-ship paradise. Hurricane corridor. Dotted with red tanker symbols thicker than the Stanley Park seawall on a sunny Sunday. My tweet:
“For those who think tourism is incompatible with safely shipping one tanker of crude oil a day, isn’t it surprising that the hurricane-prone Caribbean remains one of the world’s great tourist draws? (The red symbols are tanker ships.) @MarineTraffic”
The Cuban beach where your aunt got her tan last winter sees scores of tankers a week. Nobody cancels.
The Amsterdam thing. This one was delicious. Greenpeace’s global media operation – the one telling the world that a single tanker a day in Vancouver would mean certain spill disaster – runs out of Amsterdam. A short bike ride from their headquarters, the Dutch waterways are teeming with oil tankers. Rotterdam-Antwerp-Amsterdam is one of the busiest petroleum corridors on Earth. Greenpeace had nothing to say about it. Apparently the tankers Dutch families live, sail and swim alongside are fine. The hypothetical ones a few thousand kilometres from their Vancouver donors were a planetary emergency.
Governor Inslee’s quiet imports. Washington State governor Jay Inslee was running a presidential campaign partly built on opposing the Trans Mountain expansion and bashing Canadian energy. Meanwhile, his state’s refineries were happily taking crude shipped across the Pacific from Vladivostok. Russian molecules were welcome in Anacortes and Cherry Point. Canadian molecules from Alberta – produced in one of the most heavily regulated jurisdictions on the planet – were being told to stay landlocked. My tweet:
“Three crude oil tankers are headed into Washington State refineries at this hour. Meanwhile, state governor @JayInslee is mounting a presidential bid based on bashing energy sovereignty and maritime access. The hypocrisy is truly monumental.”
That one cleared 230 retweets and 367 likes – close to a personal best.
Oh, Canada. One March afternoon I checked the Salish Sea and noticed every single tanker on the screen – every one – was bound for an American port or already parked at one. The lone vessel sailing through Canadian waters was on its way to Washington State. My caption was four syllables: “Oh, Canada.” Still one of my favourites. My tweets often sparked, and sometimes settled, furious online arguments.
The Senate hearing
In time the maps stopped being a Twitter hobby and became evidence. I was invited to present to Canada’s Senate transport committee. There I was, walking senators through screen-grabs of MarineTraffic – Vancouver versus the Caribbean, Vancouver versus the Dutch coast, Vancouver versus a normal Tuesday at Singapore. The point landed because the data was unambiguous and the comparisons were embarrassing for the side claiming Canada was uniquely incapable of moving oil safely.
Some of what I presented made people uncomfortable. That’s usually how you know it’s working.
The day MarineTraffic noticed
At some point the company itself clocked that an obvious non-mariner was having an unusual amount of fun with the platform. They sent a polite tip of the cap from their official account in May 2018 – a small thing, but I remember being delighted by it. The platform built for shipping pros and supply-chain analysts had noticed the journalist in Vancouver using their tools to argue politics. We were both, in our way, in the storytelling business.
The image they liked was, we both knew, a slight gimmick – it didn’t actually show all the world’s tankers, there would be far too many for visualization to be possible. Yet their programmers had come up with a clever way to represent all those journeys: with coloured journey lines, faintly rendered into evocative density maps.
Me: On a Friday afternoon, what are the world’s oil tankers up to? This map from @MarineTraffic shows their locations. Tracks denote traffic density for 2016-2017. 4:05 PM · Apr 27, 2018
MarineTraffic: @MarineTraffic user @sjmuir checking out what the #tankers around the world are up to using the MarineTraffic #DensityMaps
The top 25
In late 2018 I pulled together a thread of my twenty-five most-shared tanker tweets of the year. It was the most engagement I’d had on Twitter before or since – a strange little peak in the lifecycle of any communicator. Real-time data paired with a clear argument spreads. The lesson stuck.
The wind-down
The pipeline approval drew nearer. The intensity went out of the public argument. I dropped the three-hundred-dollar tier, then the lesser levels, finally landing back at the free version. It was a long withdrawal. Personally, I was still hooked on a hundred fascinating live stories about world shipping. The vast fleets of fishing boats congregated in small clusters out in the middle of the ocean – their prey surely must not have a chance. The adrenaline surge to identify which billionaire’s 300-foot yacht that is. The origin of some intriguing workhorse ship tied up in our busy working harbour.
And now, Colbert
Which brings us to May 2026. The Strait of Hormuz is half-closed. A war with Iran is being fought partly through a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian oil. Wall Street, defence ministries and a late-night television host are watching the same screen – tiny coloured arrows, drifting or not drifting, telling everyone what the next few weeks of the world economy will look like.
The Wall Street Journal piece notes that Kpler, the parent company that absorbed MarineTraffic in 2023, has seen its annual revenue climb from $20 million in 2020 to a projected $300-400 million this year. Unique monthly visitors to MarineTraffic more than doubled this past March from a year earlier. Tanker tracking has gone from cottage-industry gossip to a global obsession.
A small piece of me feels vindicated. The wider point I was making in 2017 was that maritime data is public, abundant and clarifying – and that anyone willing to look at it could quickly cut through a lot of activist mythology. That’s even more true now. As long as the ship is sending its location signal, t`he map doesn’t lie. The ships are where they are. The arguments either survive contact with the data or they don’t.
Welcome aboard, Stephen.
The party that almost wasn’t
The Trans Mountain expansion finally opened in May 2024. I wanted to throw a party. After the better part of a decade of NIMBY warfare – the court cases, the protest camps, the foreign-funded campaigns, the kayakers in Burrard Inlet – an actual working pipeline that would lift Canada’s GDP, support First Nations partners and prove the doomsayers wrong felt worth marking.
The problem was finding anyone willing to make noise about it. The fight had been so long and so bruising that even the usual business boosters had retreated into quiet corners. I floated the idea around. Not a flicker. One business leader was the exception, and we put together a lunch with several visiting authorities on pipelines and marine safety. It went over well. As far as I could tell, it was the only event of its kind in town.
Two years on, the picture has flipped completely. The expanded pipeline has now moved more than 500 tanker cargoes out of the Westridge terminal and has been quietly contributing to Canada’s GDP every quarter since. The cultural mood has snapped back even harder. Every Canadian, it seems, wants the country to be an energy superpower. Every Uber driver in the country can explain the comparative merits of three different proposed West Coast pipeline corridors before you’ve reached the terminal.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the journey. I’m a naturally pugnacious Irishman who’d already grown a thick hide in the hardboiled newsroom years, and the sparring period was, in the way these things sometimes are, fun. I never doubted I was on the right side of the argument. The data – literally, on a map – wasn’t ambiguous.
Under the Lions Gate
The other evening I was on the Vancouver seawall, the spring light just starting to soften, locals and tourists strolling everywhere. A ship slid westward toward the setting sun under the Lions Gate Bridge. I knew immediately what it was: a tug at the bow, a trailing tug off the stern, just as the rules require. An oil tanker.
Out came the phone. Up came the app. There it was: the Long Beach, a strip of red paint showing above the waterline – cargo aboard but not full – bound for a Washington State refinery port.
Nobody took the slightest notice. Not of the ship. Not of the tugs. Not of the old guy on the seawall staring intently at his phone.
That, in a way, is the win.
Stewart Muir is president and CEO of Resource Works.
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