Barrels of U.S.-sanctioned Iranian crude oil are flowing out the Strait of Hormuz every day, including to top buyer China.
It was business as usual this week for Iran’s oil industry despite daily airstrikes by the United States and’s energy trade largely had been uninterrupted. A number of oil tankers could be seen pierside at the export hub’s eastern jetty in satellite imagery captured by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Earth observation program.
The photograph taken by the ESA’s Sentinel-2 satellites was not detailed enough to identify any missile damage from last week’s bombing, which deliberately avoided Iran’s oil infrastructure, according to Trump and the U.S. Central Command.and Kharg Island handled most of the outbound volume last year, according to the monitoring service TankerTrackers.com. Millions of barrels are exported each day. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz to the majority of non-Iranian vessel traffic by striking at random in the Persian Gulf using drones and missiles. Oil and natural gas deliveries from the gulf have been suspended and major economies including the U.S. have releasedover the continued closure of the strait, which saw commercial vessel traffic fall to just two transits on Monday from an average of 138 per day before thebetween March 1 and March 15, according to analysis by London-based Lloyd’s List Intelligence. More than one-fifth of the traffic was linked to Iran. This week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. was permitting tankers laden with sanctioned Iranian fuel to exit the strait unchallenged in order to keepAbbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, told CBS News on Sunday that Tehran was open to negotiating safe passage for the ships of certain countries. Bulk carriers and a handful of oil tankers affiliated with China, India, Pakistan, Turkey and Greece have made it through the Strait of Hormuz without attack, but it wasn’t clear whether specific arrangements had been made for their transit.For the majority of international shipping lines and their insurers, the strait is still off limits, given the risk of Iranian attacks. Of the 89 transits tracked by Lloyd’s List this week, 11 were bySynthetic aperture radar imagery captured by the ESA’s Sentinel-1 satellites on March 16 and 18 showed the strait largely empty of large vessels for the third week of the war, a sign of persistent fears—and the effectiveness of the IRGC’s tactics. Lloyd’s List said it found “no discernible pattern of targeting” in the Iranian attacks on civilian vessels in and around the strait. Around 20 ships have been struck, but the incidents appear “to be random and calibrated towards disruption rather than targeting specific profiles and national affiliation,” it said.
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