It isn’t clear why Iran thinks this will work. The EU embargo does not bar oil sold by Iran, it bars Iranian oil.
It may be that Iranian officials thought they could calm public fears by announcing that they had this gimmicky way of continuing oil sales to Europe.
Meanwhile, the Reuters news agency quoted an industry source as saying Iran’s exports during July would fall below 1.1 million barrels a day or just 45 percent of the 2.5 million barrels a day that Iran sold on average in 2011.
The 1.1 million barrels a day is based on scheduled loadings in Iran, the source said. But he said all those loadings are not likely to materialize and Iran’s actual sales will probably be well below 1.1 million.
He said China is disputing freight charges that the National Iranian Tanker Co. (NITC) wants to assess for carrying Iranian crude to China, so not all those sales are likely to be fulfilled. And he said NITC is having trouble finding tankers of the smaller size needed to deliver oil to Indian ports. If they cannot be located quickly, not all those planned loadings will occur in July.
China signed on for 492,000 barrels a day in July while India agreed to take up to 300,000. Those two countries account for more than 70 percent of the sales Iran had managed to find for July.
Hassan Khosrojerdi, head of the Union of Exporters of Oil Derivatives, announced the new plan for exporting crude by his members joined together in three consortia. He said the consortia would sell oil to privately owned European refineries. “Negotiations have been conducted with some European refiners and a deal has been struck,” he said.
He did not name the refiners or the countries, however.
No refiner in any of 27 EU states can import Iranian oil. Outside the former Soviet Union, that leaves only four countries that were formerly part of Yugoslavia plus Albania, Switzerland and Norway—and Norway is an oil exporter.