... a little back of the envelope math says ....
.... it's gonna be tough.
Let's see, Wiki says that the Alaska Class VLCC (typical big oil tanker) has a 31,658 BHP diesel engine for propulsion. That's equivalent to 23.6 MW of electrical power. So it needs a 23.6 MW solar array to power it. A 23.6 MW solar array would cover about 2 million sq ft (if you could point it directly at the sun.) But the whole ship is only 987 ft long and has beam of 166 ft. Even with some cool cantilevering you might get about 164K sq ft, or about 2 MW of solar power.
So, the total ship covered with solar panels would give it less than 10% of the power it needs to move at it's current rate. You would probably have to sit somewhere in the ocean with good sun for 12 sun hours or so (two days of actual time), figure out a way to store that energy (in heavy batteries, maybe?) and then you could move for about an hour before you ran out of energy.
That's gonna be really hard to compete with just burning a small bit of the cargo to power the diesel engine continuously.
But I'm sure the Church of the Renewables will find a way to make it work.
(Disclaimer - I just did that math on my iPhone calculator after two glasses of wine before dinner. I hope I didn't screw up too bad! 
)
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