What Kpler and Vortexa actually do

Kpler and Vortexa are commercial maritime-intelligence firms, not government statistical agencies, and neither publishes for free what this piece cites from them — everything below comes from their data as reported in trade press, industry newsletters, or the IEA's own Oil Market Report, which credits Kpler as a source. Both firms combine satellite-based Automatic Identification System (AIS) vessel tracking, port and terminal data, and cargo documentation to reconstruct, close to in real time, which tanker or LNG carrier moved how much of which product from which loading point to which destination. Vortexa describes its own coverage as 99% of global seaborne crude, clean and dirty product, and LNG flows, dating back to 2016, tracked down to individual cargo grade. This is the infrastructure behind headlines like "India's Russian crude imports hit a record high" appearing within days of the ships actually arriving — a level of transparency that, as the rest of this piece shows, simply does not exist for two much smaller commodity streams this blog has covered before: used cooking oil and used motor oil.

The tracked flow: India's oil imports in 2026

Ship-tracking data is why the shift in where India buys its crude from is visible almost as it happens, rather than months later in a customs release. Kpler and LSEG data cited in Indian and international business press shows India's imports of Russian crude climbing through 2026: roughly 1.09 million barrels a day (bpd) in January, 1.04 million bpd in February, 2.13 million bpd in May, and a reported record of between 2.58 million and 2.70 million bpd in June — different outlets citing slightly different preliminary Kpler/LSEG cuts of the same month, a reminder that even cargo-level tracking data gets revised. Russia accounted for more than half of India's total crude imports that month. The discount on offer narrowed sharply over the same period: Indian refiners paid a premium of $13–15 a barrel for Russian crude in the immediate aftermath of the Ukraine war's escalation phase (March–May), which had flipped to a $2–5 discount by June, as China cut its own purchases and left Russia needing another buyer. This blog's own reporting covers the immediate trigger for the volume surge: the Strait of Hormuz disruption pushed Indian refiners to lock in whatever non-Gulf barrels they could get, Russian included. A parallel, US-sanctions-driven policy shift is reported to be pushing the other way from December 2026 onward, with India said to be planning cuts to direct Russian oil purchases — a plan whose actual implementation this piece has not independently verified.

The tracked flow: LNG and the floating-storage story this blog already told

Kpler's own 2026 gas-market outlook forecast a supply surge of roughly 37 million tonnes a year (mtpa) of new LNG capacity coming online in 2026, enough to push prices below $10 per million British thermal units and compress US exporters' margins, while assuming Arctic LNG 2 stays capped near 45% utilisation (about 5.7 million tonnes) under continued sanctions, with its uncommitted cargoes rerouted toward Turkey and Egypt. Vortexa's own tracking, separately, showed seaborne clean product exports running roughly 4–5% above the prior year's average in early 2026. On the crude side, the same cargo-level visibility is what let Vortexa put a number on the mid-2026 Hormuz shock: Iranian crude specifically held in floating storage at roughly 135 million barrels in early August, up 14% in a month, as tankers laden with Iranian crude idled offshore rather than risk the blockaded strait. This blog's own reporting on that floating-storage buildup goes into the mechanism in full; it is not repeated here beyond this cross-reference.

The freight-market echo, and the fleet built to dodge the tracking

Ship-broker reporting aggregated by Hellenic Shipping News shows what the Hormuz disruption did to the price of the ships themselves, not just the cargo: global average Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) earnings rose 68% week-on-week to a fresh record of roughly $451,000 a day around 12 September 2026, with the closely-watched Persian Gulf-to-China route hitting record levels in the west (US Gulf-to-China at $19/bbl) and the east (Oman-to-Korea at $572,000/day) alike, as prompt tonnage able and willing to transit the strait became scarce. Clarksons Research's own data shows the shipowning side of the market responding to exactly that kind of earnings spike: 150 VLCCs were ordered in 2026 alone, already the largest annual tally since 1973, with top-tier Chinese yard slots effectively sold out to 2028 against a global build capacity of only 40–50 VLCCs a year. LNG carriers are having close to the opposite year: Clarksons put spot rates for a standard 174,000-cubic-metre LNG carrier at roughly $24,606 a day in 2026, down 56% year-on-year, even as the LNG orderbook itself sits at 44% of the existing fleet and is projected to overtake the VLCC fleet in size by the end of 2026 — a shipbuilding boom running well ahead of near-term demand for the ships it is building.

The untracked flow: used cooking oil, and why that's now a trade war

Nothing resembling Kpler or Vortexa's cargo-level confidence exists for used cooking oil (UCO). Global formal trade in it runs an estimated 4.5–5.0 million tonnes a year, and the reason the number carries "estimated" rather than "measured" is structural: UCO is collected from millions of small kitchens and restaurants, aggregated by traders with wildly uneven paperwork, and shipped as a commodity that is chemically difficult to tell apart from virgin vegetable oil once refined. China has been the dominant exporter since 2017; its own customs data shows cumulative UCO exports of 1.37 million tonnes for January–May 2026, up 36.8% on the same period in 2025, with the United States (74,505 tonnes in May alone), the Netherlands, Italy, Canada, Singapore and Malaysia as the leading destinations — Malaysia serving largely as a consolidation and re-export hub for the wider region rather than a source of its own supply.

That export growth sits inside an active trade fight. The US now charges a 125% tariff on Chinese UCO, collapsing a trade that was worth $1.1 billion to China the year before, after Washington cancelled China's UCO export-tax rebate in December 2024 — a change that redirected volumes into China's own domestic biodiesel industry and pushed exporters toward Europe instead, where reported Chinese biodiesel imports (increasingly UCO-derived) had already jumped by around 40% amid the same shift. That redirection is precisely what has fed a second, separate problem: fraud. Because UCO cannot be reliably distinguished from virgin oil by simple testing, campaigners and traders alike have raised sustained suspicion that some volumes labelled "used" from China and Southeast Asia are in fact fresh palm or other vegetable oil sold at the premium UCO commands under biofuel sustainability rules. Independent estimates of the resulting mislabelling rate in global UCO trade run as high as 15–25%. The demand side keeps intensifying the incentive to cheat: global airlines are projected to roughly triple demand for UCO as an aviation-fuel feedstock by 2030, and Europe today burns through an estimated 130,000 barrels of used cooking oil a day — about eight times what it collects domestically — making it structurally reliant on exactly the import streams now under suspicion.

India's own UCO problem: not fraud, just not enough of it collected

India's version of the UCO story is less about fraud and more about a collection system that has never worked at scale. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) launched its Repurpose Used Cooking Oil (RUCO) initiative in 2018 specifically to divert UCO from commercial kitchens into biodiesel rather than back into the food chain. As of mid-2026, FSSAI had provisionally enrolled 63 Non-Food Production (NFP) units — biodiesel manufacturers and soap producers across Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh — to collect it, with that provisional enrolment extended to 31 July 2026. One 2026 industry estimate puts India's total annual UCO generation at roughly 3 million tonnes; this blog's own reporting on the SAF side of the same feedstock separately cited a 1.8–2.6 million tonne range with only 6% actually collected — the two figures do not reconcile cleanly, a reminder that India, like the rest of the world, does not have one trusted number for how much UCO it even generates. What both sources agree on is the direction: reported collection-drive activity was itself dented further in mid-2026 by West Asia-linked price pressure, per contemporaneous Tamil Nadu coverage of individual collectors' volumes roughly halving.

Source: Invest India briefing compiling USDA (2023) data on India's biodiesel feedstock mix by year; figures are for feedstock actually processed into biodiesel, not total UCO generated (see caveat above on generation estimates). Non-edible industrial oils have consistently supplied the largest single share; UCO's contribution grew in absolute terms across the decade but its share of the total held roughly flat.

The blend-rate consequence of that stagnant supply is stark: India's actual biodiesel blend rate was just 0.07% in 2022, itself an improvement on 0.02% in 2021, against a national target of 5% by 2030 set under the 2018 National Biofuels Policy. Ten biodiesel plants existed nationally as of 2022 with a combined 600-million-litre capacity, but the same briefing that supplied these figures also lists 42 separate FSSAI-enrolled biodiesel manufacturers with RUCO agency tie-ups spread from Andhra Pradesh to Uttarakhand — formal registration running well ahead of the volumes actually being processed.

The other untracked flow: used motor oil, and India's first attempts to formalise it

This blog's own reporting already covers what the government now requires of used lubricating oil (ULO) collection in India in detail; this section adds the 2026 commercial developments and the global market context around them, rather than repeating that ground. Globally, the picture is similar in shape to UCO's but with less fraud and more formal momentum: the re-refined base-oil market was valued at roughly $6.8 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $11.88 billion by 2035, a 6.4% compound annual growth rate, while the broader waste-oil recycling market grew an estimated 9.4% year-on-year into 2026 to around $5.24 billion. In mature markets, roughly 80% of collected ULO is already recycled or regenerated, with the European Union's Green Deal explicitly treating used oil as a feedstock rather than waste and pushing operators like Avista Oil and Puraglobe to expand re-refining capacity.

India starts from a much lower base and is visibly trying to catch up in 2026. The country still imports an estimated 60% of its base-oil demand. Indian Oil Corporation (IOCL) signed a memorandum of understanding with Re Sustainability on 13 March 2026, described as India's first structured national initiative for ULO collection, targeting 100 kilotonnes a year (KTA) of used lubricating oil collection nationally, feeding a planned re-refining facility sized at 50–100 KTA and targeted for commissioning within three years, to produce Group I and Group II+ base oils. Bharat Petroleum (BPCL) followed in July 2026 with its own MoU alongside IFP Petro Products, aimed at building a nationwide ULO collection, traceability and re-refining ecosystem explicitly tied to India's tightening Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) obligations. On the supply side, Chennai Petroleum Corporation (CPCL) began work in May 2026 on a ₹1,600-crore Lube Oil Base Stock unit at its Manali refinery, targeting 242,000 tonnes a year of Group II and Group III base stock, while IOCL separately plans to add 1.28 million tonnes a year of Group II/III capacity across three refineries by 2027.

What doesn't follow from any of this

None of the above shows that Kpler and Vortexa's cargo-level tracking is itself infallible — both are commercial estimates built from AIS signals and port data, subject to gaps when vessels go dark or cargoes are transshipped to obscure origin, which is exactly the technique the shadow fleet described in Section 3b is built around. Nor does the UCO fraud discussion establish that Indian UCO exports specifically carry the same mislabelling risk documented for Chinese exports; this piece found no dedicated investigation of Indian UCO export integrity, only India's own domestic collection shortfall, which is a different problem. And the ULO MoUs listed above are announcements of intent with tonnage targets, not yet independently confirmed operating volumes — the same caveat this blog has applied to announced-but-unbuilt energy projects before.

What would fix this

• Publish one reconciled, government-owned UCO generation estimate for India, replacing the current mix of a roughly 3-million-tonne industry figure and this blog's own earlier-cited 1.8–2.6 million tonne range with a single number an agency stands behind.
• Require batch-level origin documentation on UCO imports and exports at the same standard already expected of ship-tracked crude cargoes, so a country's declared UCO trade can be checked against an independent record rather than customs self-declaration alone.
• Publish actual tonnes collected and re-refined under the IOCL–Re Sustainability and BPCL–IFP ULO agreements on a running basis, not only at signing, so the 100,000-tonne target and its counterparts can be checked against real throughput as the decade progresses.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.