By Olga Tanas and Julian Lee
Feb 25, 2025 (Bloomberg) –Iranian oil sellers risk facing significant hurdles moving their cargoes out of the country as competition for unsanctioned tankers from Russia and Venezuela intensifies, according to analytics firm Kpler.
Iran “is already grappling with shortage of available shipping capacity,” senior crude oil analyst Muyu Xu said at a Kpler event in London Monday. “There is only a number of tankers on the market willing to take high-risk sanctioned oil and now Iran needs to compete with Russia and Venezuela to secure them.”
While there were about 150 tankers engaged in Iranian crude oil transport in 2024, more than 100 of those have been added to a list of vessels sanctioned by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The pool of available takers risks shrinking further as Russia attracts them with higher freight rates. January sanctions on Moscow severely curtailed the activities of the tankers that the US blacklisted, vessel tracking by Bloomberg shows.
Two of the ships sanctioned by OFAC on Monday for their involvement in Iran’s oil trade — the Phoenix I and Urgane I — have loaded Russian cargoes in recent days, according to vessel tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.
For Iran, an additional difficulty is it still needs to move about 25 million barrels of crude that it put into storage in China during 2018 and 2019. Iran may have already have managed to move out more than half of them, but that’s come at the expense of harsher US sanctions on some tankers, according to Xu.
With nearly 80 Iran-linked tankers targeted by the US since the fourth quarter of 2024, “we have observed the decline of Iranian crude exports,” Xu said. Shipments have slipped to about 1.5 million barrels a day and from 1.76 million barrels a day in November. Exports could fall by about a third from their current level by May or by June, she added.
“If the US were to remove sanctions on Russian tankers that would be an extremely good news for Iran,” Xu said, “because finally they can see the freight rate for Russian oil going down and potentially they can have more tankers available.”
© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.
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