November 29, 2024
An oil terminal Iran built to bypass the Strait of Hormuz appears to have partially been filled with crude offering Tehran a means to get some of its oil onto the market if the Strait of Hormuz is ever closed. The Jask oil terminal officially opened in July 2021 but largely inactive as a loading facility ever since was about half filled late in September, an image from the Sentinel Hub website shows. By mid-October, another of its tanks also appeared to have been filled, Bloomberg News reported.
The terminal is important because Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz multiple times over the years, something that draws laughter because that would block all exports of Iranian oil, while just blocking exports of some Saudi and UAE oil.
Saudi Arabia long ago built pipelines across its deserts to the Red Sea and the UAE has built pipelines to terminals on the Gulf of Oman so they can bypass the Strait of Hormuz and keep exporting much oil if the strait is blocked.
Around the time of the official Jask terminal opening back in 2021, two small tankers did appear to load crude, but the feat wasn’t repeated again until this September, according to satellite imagery reviewed by Bloomberg. Still, even when up and running in full, Jask isn’t about to supplant Kharg Island as the nation’s main oil outlet. Plans indicated that the facility would have the capacity to load 1 million barrels a day of crude and the ability to hold 20 times that much in tanks, ready for shipment.
But it seems well short of that, with just one of three planned loading buoys actually installed. Kharg Island handled as much as six times that in the 1970s, before the revolution. After the revolution, the Islamic Republic severely reduced the volume of its exports, saying the monarchy was endangering Iran by exporting so much.
The most recent loading at Jask, and the only one in the past three years, took place from September 9 to 19. The vessel was identified by the business firm TankerTrackers.com as the Iranian-owned supertanker Dune, capable of carrying about 2 million barrels of crude. The monitoring company confirmed that it had seen no other cargoes loaded from Jask since 2021.
Kharg Island, at the northern end of the Persian Gulf, has been the most important outlet for Iran’s crude exports since the 1960s. It has more than 50 storage tanks and loading jetties with berths for as many as 10 tankers, theoretically meaning it could move as much as 5.5 million barrels a day now, well more than the 2.5 million barrels a day that Iran exported from the end of the Iran-Iraq war until punitive sanctions were applied in 2012 by the US and EU.
