How much could you profit by chartering a super tanker for oil storage?

The stock market is going crazy right now with oil tanking companies seeing massive increases in share prices over the last few days.

The screen cap is from FRO as of Jan 9th, an impressive 56% increase in share price over the last 5 days.

Stories are starting to pop up in various news sites noting the replay of the usage of super tankers as storage facilities for so that you can buy oil now and sell them at a higher price. Let's do some cursory math:

Some Basic details:

• WTI is trading at $48.21 for the current Feb contracts
• The Dec contracts are trading with a ~$7 spread to the Feb contracts
• A suezmax tanker has a daily running cost of $12,000 and 1 million barrels of oil capacity 
• The gross profit margin is 75% for one ship

(Details are extracted from the following link)

Some calculations:

• Chartering one of these ships for 10 months will cost ~ $6.3 million
• The profit from this spread trade using one tanker is ~ $7 million
• The cost of the oil upfront is ~ $48.2 million
• Your profit from this trade is = $675 k or a 1.4% profit margin

As of this moment, I somewhat doubt that companies that have $48.2 million on hand will be willing to invest this amount of money for a 1.4% return over the next 10 months. It wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to be borrowing this money from any sort of bank to make this kind of profit in the first place.

Also, of an interesting note, it takes approximately 10 for a tanker to go from Tokyo to the Vancouver. The only companies that would be profiting the most from this activity would be companies that manage the purchase of oil and their delivery in some future point of time.

I would not expect oil shipping companies to see an increase in ship utility just yet unless countries away from the major oil distribution hubs are looking to bolster their oil reserves at current prices.