The company continues to carry crude produced by Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Total SA, in addition to oil from Saudi Aramco and state-run producers in Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. “We have not faced any problem,” Ghareh said.
The Iranian operator expects by 2013 to have 74 ships of all sizes, including very large crude carriers, he said. NITC will operate 50 VLCCs at that time, up from 28 today.
NITC now ranks as the fifth-biggest tanker operator worldwide, with a total of 43 ships, he said. Norway’s Frontline Ltd. is the world’s largest operator of supertankers.
NITC plans to buy liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers when Iran starts producing LNG, Ghareh said, without specifying when this would happen. Iran’s LNG program is currently going nowhere as sanctions have cut off its access to LNG technology. NITC would eventually need 83 LNG tankers, based on Iran’s production plans for the fuel, he said.
While sanctions may pose no challenge for NITC, piracy does. Like many other shipping lines in the Middle East, NITC has been under attack from pirates out of Somalia. Its tankers have been attacked 16 times so far, said the company’s Technical Manager Anwar Lodhi.
“Our view is that the ships should be allowed to carry weapons” to defend against pirate attacks, Lodhi told reporters. NITC’s tankers “carry guards sometimes, but they are not armed,” he said.