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DMEA terminAls & shiPPinG DMEA
Ship-to-ship transfers suggest China making Iran oil purchases
miDDle eAst
An insight into how much Iranian oil might be making its way to China via ship-to-ship trans- fers, in de ance of Us sanctions, has been given by new tracking data.
Oil imports subject to such transfers and absorbed by China last month reportedly surged. some 910,000 tonnes of crude, three times as much as in August, was o oaded at Chinese ports a er being transferred in the south China sea, according to ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. It’s not clear where this oil derived from, but moving crude from one vessel to another at sea is a common way of disguising cargo origins and China, the world’s biggest crude importer, has been struggling to replace lost barrels from Iran and Venezuela, also hit by Us sanctions this year.
Oil cargoes from the Us arriving in China also dropped markedly last month, the data show. Beijing imposed tari s on American oil for the rst time on september 1 as the trade war worsened.
“I think its highly likely that these ship-to- ship and Malaysian volumes are Iranian or Venezuelan crude,” Bloomberg quoted Michal Meidan, director of the China Energy Pro- gramme at the Oxford Institute for Energy stud- ies, as saying. “But of course the whole point here is to make it hard to be sure.”
Washington is not likely to succeed with its campaign to entirely drive Iranian oil exports o
world markets and Iran is expected to maintain its shipped crude consignments at 400,000 b/d in the second half of 2019 and 2020, according to a Fitch solutions Macro Research research note cited by Rigzone on september 10.
“Despite all [Iran oil] exports now being sanctionable, volumes have continued to ow out of Iran to buyers in markets including China, syria and turkey,” the note said.
“Exports have become increasingly di cult to track, with tankers routinely turning o their transponders and performing complex chains of ship-to-ship transfers,” the note added.
China has thrown Iran a “vital lifeline” and taken the lion’s share of exports in the period since sanctions waivers expired in May, accord- ing to the note.
“ is is not unexpected, given that Beijing and its state-backed enterprises have the greatest capacity to circumvent Us sanctions,” it stated.
Based on Bloomberg’s tanker tracking data, around 55% of Iranian oil exports since May have been taken up by Chinese buyers and “we expect this dynamic to remain in play over the coming quarters”, the cited note added.
the Us has set out to cripple Iran’s econ- omy to force tehran to make concessions on its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes and its support provided to militias across the Middle East that are variously enemies of Israel and Arab allies of Washington.™
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 40 10•October•2019