UAE slips hidden oil tankers through Strait of Hormuz
With their location trackers shut off to avoid Iranian attacks, the United Arab Emirates and buyers have recently sailed several tankers loaded with crude through the Strait of Hormuz in a bid to move oil bottled up in the Gulf by the Middle East conflict, according to industry sources and shipping data.
The volumes are a fraction of the UAE's typical exports before the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran but they demonstrate the risks the producer and buyers are willing to take to free up oil sales. The other Gulf producers - Iraq, Kuwait, and Qatar - have either halted sales, deeply cut prices to entice uninterested buyers or are shipping only through the Red Sea in the case of Saudi Arabia.
In April, the UAE's Abu Dhabi National Oil Co managed to export at least 4 million barrels of its Upper Zakum crude and 2 million barrels of Das crude on four tankers from terminals inside the Gulf, according to three sources, shiptracking data from Kpler and an analysis of satellite data from SynMax.
The shipments were either unloaded by ship-to-ship (STS) transfer to a vessel that later carried the oil to a Southeast Asian refinery, unloaded into storage in Oman or sailed directly to South Korean refineries, according to the three sources, one with direct knowledge of the matter and two familiar with ADNOC's operations, and the Kpler and SynMax data.
Reuters is reporting this system of exports for the first time.
ADNOC declined to comment on the shipments.
Tehran responded to the U.S.-Israeli attacks that began on February 28 by effectively shutting the Strait of Hormuz to exports other than its own, bottling up a fifth of global oil and gas supply. The closure and a U.S. blockade that has halted Iranian exports in recent weeks has pushed global oil prices over $100 a barrel.
ADNOC has had to cut exports by more than 1 million barrels per day since the start of the war, from the 3.1 million bpd it shipped last year, Kpler data showed. Most of its exports are its Murban grade exported by pipeline from onshore fields to Fujairah.
