“On the afternoon of July 25, the Greek-owned supertanker Kiku docked at Qatar’s Mesaieed oil export terminal, a massive, 30-berth port on the country’s west coast, 25 miles south of Doha. Four days later, loaded with crude oil, the Kiku passed through the Strait of Hormuz. The Very Large Crude Carrier – the largest oil”, — write on: www.cnn.com
On the afternoon of July 25, the Greek-owned supertanker Kiku docked at Qatar’s Mesaieed oil export terminal, a massive, 30-berth port on the country’s west coast, 25 miles south of Doha.
Four days later, loaded with crude oil, the Kiku passed through the Strait of Hormuz. The Very Large Crude Carrier – the largest oil tanker class, stretching over 1,000 feet – maintained a steady pace of 13 knots across the Persian Gulf, near its top speed.
Then, on July 31, shortly after 2 pm just off the coast of Dubai, the Kiku vanished.
The vessel had switched off its AIS transponder, a marine radio device that broadcasts a ship’s identity, speed, course and position. To tracking services that monitor worldwide maritime traffic, it was as if the Kiku simply disappeared.
Suddenly, at 10 am on August 1, the Kiku’s signal reappeared – on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz.
It was part of the oil industry’s latest tactic – “dark,” US-military-escorted nighttime transits across the strait. The aim: Avoid Iranian drone attacks – like the one that struck the Kiku a month earlier, but failed to explode.
Aided by the US Navy, Saudi, Kuwaiti, Qatari and Emirati oil companies have chartered oil tankers to turn their transponders off and shuttle oil out of the Persian Gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz, to the Gulf of Oman, where they offload their crude to waiting tankers owned by their customers and then head back through the strait.
That has taken the costly burden of insurance risk and physical danger of Iranian attacks away from commercial shippers and placed it on the US government and the oil producers themselves.
It has become an effective strategy, according to the US Department of Energy, which says oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has averaged between 8 million and 9 million barrels per day. That’s a meaningful amount of crude – roughly double what Wall Street oil analysts and shipping trackers like Kpler, using transponder data, would suggest.
The clandestine transits have changed the game for the Middle Eastern oil industry.
CNN has observed more than a dozen ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman over two days, with tankers moving on to destinations such as China, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand.
It’s a dangerous and expensive gambit that offers some temporary relief to the oil market. But with permanent solutions – a negotiated end to the war and lasting plan for the strait – remaining elusive, this workaround buys time.
The increase in dark transits like the Kiku’s recent journey comes at a crucial time for the energy market.
The war, lasting far longer than many had imagined, has disrupted a fifth of the world’s oil supply for six months but reached an inflection point in recent weeks: Billions of oil and fuel barrels in commercial stockpiles have vanished. US emergency reserves haven’t been this small since the early 1980s. China’s reliance on its massive oil inventory – a key factor in preventing $150 oil – won’t last forever. And bond market investors and voters are running out of patience with high prices.
Facing a nightmare scenario, Middle Eastern oil producers starting using their new strategy over the past several weeks. It’s not a perfect solution – the strait is famously narrow, just 23 miles wide. There aren’t many places to hide, and radar can still spot a ship even with its transponder off. Two ships belonging to the UAE were attacked this week.
But about 80% of traffic through the strait over the past two weeks has been “dark,” transiting around the coast of Oman, as far from Iran as possible, according to Kpler. Because of the regional conflict, some tracking data has been subject to GPS jamming, which can make it difficult to make assessments.
Like many ships using this new tactic, the Kiku reappeared a day after its transponder turned off while anchored near the Emirati port city of Fujairah. After its transponder started pinging again, the Kiku anchored alongside another Greek supertanker, the Nave Electron, which had arrived in the Gulf of Oman a day earlier.
The two ships stayed together for a week in a ship-to-ship oil transfer. When they finally separated on August 8, the Nave Electron exited the Gulf, loaded with oil, headed toward the Arabian sea on route to Ningbo, China.
The Kiku stayed put off the coast of Fujairah until around August 14, when it went dark once again. The next day, just before 4 pm, its signal reemerged in the Persian Gulf, heading back toward Qatar.
The escorted dark transits are the latest example of Middle Eastern oil producers increasing the amount of oil that they can export to customers around the world, flipping the script on Iran.
Most notably, Saudi Arabia has rerouted about 5 million barrels of oil per day that would have been destined for awaiting oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. Instead, that oil has traveled through its East-West pipeline to its port of Yanbu on the Red Sea. Middle Eastern oil producers have rerouted another 2 million barrels per day around the Strait of Hormuz.
Production has ramped up around the world to compensate, too. Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela have combined to add more than 1 million barrels per day of extra production. The United States has added hundreds of thousands more barrels daily to the market.
And far less coordinated (or militarily protected) dark transits have been taking place for months.
On the other side of the equation, the United States has released 400 million barrels of emergency oil, vastly drawing down its stockpiles in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. China, too, has relied heavily on its own massive oil stockpiles, while simultaneously drastically reducing its crude imports. Global demand has also shrunk significantly with rising prices, helping to balance the oil market and get oil to the customers who need it.
The market keeps finding a way. It has proven far more complex and significantly more flexible than even the most knowledgeable experts anticipated when the war started.
Radar and satellite imagery of the Strait of Hormuz paints a picture transponder data can’t see. For example, in August 14 satellite photos, rows of dots appear arcing around the coast of Oman through the strait of Hormuz. But those dots don’t align with ship-tracking data from the same day and time. The “dots” went dark.
On August 7, two Greek-owned tankers appeared next to one another in the Gulf of Oman on transponder data. Satellite images show the Nissos Kythnos, a shuttle tanker that had made a dark strait run, lined up next to the Front Otra. On August 14, the Front Otra was detected in the Arabian Sea on route to Taiwan. The Nissos Kythios was back in the Persian Gulf.
But it can’t last this way forever.
Oil inventories have been depleted by as much as 1.9 billion barrels during the course of the war. If the market reaches equilibrium, those will need to be filled to prevent the next crisis. If it doesn’t, those stockpiles will eventually be drained so low that they can no longer be relied on to meet the world’s oil demand, reaching a tipping point where the only solution is to raise oil prices significantly to choke off even more demand.
A similar problem has already emerged in the fuel market: Three of the world’s four refining hubs are in severe distress.
The Iran war has damaged refineries in the Middle East and slowed the export of fuel out of that region.
Russia, another major source of fuel, has been knocked offline by another war, the conflict with Ukraine. Refineries in Russia have been targeted by Ukrainian drones and Moscow, facing a fuel shortage at home, has cut off its exports.
China, seeking to avoid fuel shortages of its own, is limiting its own refined fuel exports. That’s critical because China is normally a major fuel exporter.
That leaves US refineries along the Gulf Coast shouldering the burden of global demand. But US refineries can’t run all-out forever.
Gas, and especially diesel and jet fuel, are in such high demand with such little refining capacity to make it, that prices have soared – well beyond what crude oil prices would suggest they should be.
President Donald Trump had successfully jawboned oil prices lower for months by promising a looming breakthrough in negotiations. His plan has recently changed, though: America’s new strategy is to strangle Iran, unleashing a “crushing economic operation” by means of a prolonged naval blockade of Iran’s ports.
That has sent oil prices creeping higher for weeks, edging closer to $100 a barrel.
With the two countries locked in an intractable quagmire of a war, the battle over control of the strait has kept oil – especially gas, diesel and jet fuel – at uncomfortably high prices for consumers, boosting inflation and shrinking their disposable income.
But the market’s impressive ability to at least partially work its way around the conflict has also prevented prices from surging as astronomically high as the world’s largest-ever oil supply shock would suggest.
CNN’s Sarah El Sirgany and Farida Elsebai contributed to this report.