The blockade ordered by the Trump administration as leverage in ceasefire negotiations has redirected more than 40 vessels attempting to pass through with Iranian oil and other cargo
New Delhi: Thirty-one tankers carrying 53 million barrels of Iranian crude are sitting immobile in the Gulf of Oman and the Pentagon now estimates Tehran has lost $4.8 billion in oil revenue since the US naval blockade began on April 13.
This is roughly three weeks of economic strangulation, with more to come, according to an exclusive report by the news website Axios.
The blockade ordered by the Trump administration as leverage in ceasefire negotiations has redirected more than 40 vessels attempting to pass through with Iranian oil and other cargo, Pentagon officials told Axios, adding two ships have been seized outright.
With Iran’s on-land storage reaching capacity and unable to load fresh tankers, Tehran has begun using older vessels as floating warehouses in a stopgap mechanism that extends the crisis but doesn’t resolve it.
Analysts estimate the country is “several weeks, or perhaps as much as a month, away from running out of storage,” Gregory Brew of the Eurasia Group told Axios. When that happens, oil wells would need to shut down.
Some Iranian tankers have already found workarounds which are expensive, rather than risk US interdiction in the Gulf of Oman and some vessels have taken longer, costlier routes hugging the coastlines of Pakistan and India before reaching the Malacca Strait, where crude is typically offloaded onto China-bound ships.
Tanker tracking firm TankerTrackers co-founder Samir Madani pointed to the large Iranian tanker “HUGE” as a template for evasion. Madani said Iranian tankers currently bottled up may eventually attempt a coordinated break once enough storage has been built up near the Pakistan border or a single overnight mass transit attempt becomes conceivable.
After Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to trap westbound commercial shipping, the US had responded by blockading the Gulf of Oman’s western entrance, trapping Iranian exports. Both sides are using maritime chokepoints as economic weapons in what the Pentagon is now calling a cold war phase of the conflict.
Acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez termed the blockade as delivering “the decisive impact we intended,” adding that it was “inflicting a devastating blow to the Iranian regime’s ability to fund terrorism and regional destabilisation.”
