In the waters off Malaysia, Iranian oil sales continue despite blockade
On Saturday last week, the Iranian oil tanker Humanity sailed through the Straits of Malacca and Singapore before veering northeast towards the coast of Malaysia
On Saturday last week, the Iranian oil tanker Humanity sailed through the Straits of Malacca and Singapore before veering northeast towards the coast of Malaysia, where it suddenly turned off its automatic identification system (AIS). Satellite tracking data showed the 330-metre (1,083ft) crude oil tanker had arrived at the Eastern Outer Port Limits (EOPL) of Malaysia, a 1,200-square-kilometre (463-square-mile) expanse of water in the South China Sea about 70km (43 miles) off the shore. Maritime security experts say the Humanity likely went “dark” as it was preparing to offload its cargo of Iranian oil in a ship-to-ship transfer to a waiting middleman. They say the cargo’s ultimate destination is likely China, which historically buys about 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports, according to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. For decades, the EOPL has served as an unofficial marketplace for sanctioned Iranian, Russian and Venezuelan oil, analysts say. Now, satellite data shows that EOPL activity has continued throughout the five-month-long United States-Israel war on Iran and despite a US naval blockade of Iranian ports that ran from April 13 to June 18 and resumed on July 14. Ray Powell, director of SeaLight, a maritime security monitoring project affiliated with Stanford University, told Al Jazeera he has observed 62 ships broadcasting false or decommissioned ship identities since the start of the year while moving between the Gulf, the EOPL, Hong Kong and then onto northern China. These ships are part of a network of middlemen who facilitate the sale of Iranian oil to China’s independent “teapot” oil refineries, according to Erica Downs, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
“Crude oil bound for China from Iran involves ship-to-ship transfers in international waters, which can happen multiple times before reaching China, to disguise the crude’s origins,” she said. Unlike China’s huge state-owned enterprises such as CNPC, Sinopec, and CNOOC, these small refineries are less exposed to the US financial system, which makes them more willing to buy discounted but sanctioned Iranian oil, she told Al Jazeera. Calm waters The anchorage area off Malaysia’s EOPL area is “just as busy as it has ever been,” said Charlie Brown, a maritime security expert and director of Southeast Asia Regional Programs at the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies (YCAPS). “Before the war and [throughout] all the different phases of the conflict, there’ve been ships out there anchoring and conducting all kinds of different things like ship-to-ship operations.” Spanning roughly the size of Hong Kong, the EOPL offers the advantage of calm waters that are close enough to reach suppliers in Singapore and Malaysia but far enough to make the area a historically grey legal one. The EOPL is outside Malaysia’s territorial waters but within its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), a designation that addresses issues like fishing rights and natural resource exploitation rather than sanctions compliance at sea. Malaysia’s Maritime Enforcement Agency has said in the past that the area is challenging to patrol due to its remoteness and “jurisdictional gaps”. However, Kuala Lumpur has moved to strengthen its legal toolkit. In June, Malaysia amended its Exclusive Economic Zone Act to crack down on illegal anchoring, resupplying or “bunkering”, and ship-to-ship cargo transfers conducted in its EEZ without government approval. Malaysia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
The BriefWire