Iran’s Oil Exports Hit New Highs Due To China’s Rising Demand

Iran’s Oil Exports Hit New Highs Due To China’s Rising Demand

Iranian oil exports have hit a record high largely due to the rising demand from China, media reports confirm. “Iranian oil exports hit new highs in the last two months of 2022 and are making a strong start to 2023 despite U.S. sanctions,” Reuters reported this week.

Iran’s booming oil trade comes despite sanctions on Iran’s oil and shipping industry imposed by the Trump administration. “Tehran’s oil exports have been limited since former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2018 exited a 2015 nuclear accord and reimposed sanctions aimed at curbing oil exports and the associated revenue to Iran’s government,” the news agency noted.

The rise in Iranian oil exports is largely thanks to increased Chinese intake, Bloomberg confirmed Friday. “The extra Iranian barrels appear to be bound for China,” the news outlet noted.

Media speculations suggest the Biden White House is tacitly endorsing the Iranian oil exports to China, ignoring the Trump-era sanctions. According to Bloomberg, “several oil traders have speculated that the US is happy for Iranian shipments to continue as long as they help keep oil prices in check.”

Besides Iran, China is also buying oil from Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro regime, a breach of the sweeping oil sanctions imposed by the Trump administration.

“Malaysian waters have long been a hub for transferring crude and petroleum products from one tanker to another, sometimes masking the origin. Barrels from Iran and Venezuela have previously been re-branded as oil from Malaysia and Oman,” the business news outlet disclosed.

Bloomberg reported China’s bustling oil trade with the rogue regimes of Iran and Venezuela:

Iran’s oil exports are surging, offering solace to both Tehran and a global market fretting over the prospect of sanctions squeezing Russian supply. Much of it appears to be finding its way to China.

The Persian Gulf country’s oil exports climbed to about 1.3 million barrels a day in November, and last month held near the highest in four years, according to data from Vortexa Ltd. and Kpler, two well-known shipping analytics firms.

FGE, an energy-market consultant, forecasts that Iran will boost its shipments of crude and refined products by as much as 200,000 barrels a day this year. (…)

Still, several oil traders have speculated that the US is happy for Iranian shipments to continue as long as they help keep oil prices in check.

The extra Iranian barrels appear to be bound for China, the world’s biggest oil importer, under the banner of shipments from Malaysia. Beijing’s intake from the Asian nation surged to a record in December, figures from China’s customs administration show.

Malaysian exports to China on that scale are unfeasible. They were almost triple the average daily crude output from the Southeast Asian nation over the first nine months of 2022. The flows also surpassed those of OPEC giants Iraq and the United Arab Emirates.

“China’s crude imports from Iran picked up to a new record in the last month of 2022,” Armen Azizan, an analyst at Vortexa, said in a report. (…)

Malaysian waters have long been a hub for transferring crude and petroleum products from one tanker to another, sometimes masking the origin. Barrels from Iran and Venezuela have previously been re-branded as oil from Malaysia and Oman.

The official data show Malaysia as China’s third-biggest supplier of crude last month, trailing only Saudi Arabia and Russia. Shipments from Iraq were at 5.06 million tons, while flows from the UAE were at 4.95 million tons in December.

Across 2022, China imported a total of 35.7 million tons of crude from Malaysia, making the Southeast Asian nation the sixth-biggest supplier, ahead of Brazil, and OPEC members Kuwait and Angola.

The revelations comes after a video of President Joe Biden surfaced last month in which he admitted that the Iran deal is “dead” and the country’s Shia-Islamic regime was going to get a nuclear weapons.

The Iran deal “is dead, but we are not going to announce it,” Biden blurted out while interacting with a crowd at an event in California. Referring to the Mullah regime the U.S. president said that “they will have a nuclear weapon.”

The White House, which is accustomed to walking back Biden’s gaffes and incoherent utterances, appears to confirm the president’s revealing remarks. “The White House did not respond to a request for comment or dispute the authenticity of the video,” The New York Post reported on December 20, 2022.

Having dismantled President Trump’s policy of Maximum Pressure, the Biden administration tried to appease Iran in hopes of restoring the 2015 nuclear deal. After President Biden eased sanctions placed by the previous administration on Tehran — the world’s biggest state-sponsor of terrorism, the regime stepped up its WMD program and is on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power.

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