The vessel was called a VLCC, a Very Large Crude Carrier, a ship for carrying crude oil from a terminal to its destination. Simplistically they were employed to ferry their contents from a seller nation, an oil exporting country, to a buyer nation.
This particular vessel was three-hundred and thirty meters long, with a dead-weight tonnage of three-hundred and twenty thousand and could carry two million barrels of oil.
The ship was owned by the National Iranian Tanker Company, NITC, and flew the country’s flag when it docked at Kharg Island. The offshore terminal was Iran’s primary crude oil terminal, where five million barrels a day could be loaded onto vessels.
The VLCC had been at the terminal for three days, loading not just crude but also food and crew, while maintenance work was carried out.
On the fourth day, as Mostofi and the Supreme Leader were meeting, it sailed out.
It would sail through the Hormuz Strait, which connected the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman. The strip of water was only twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point but accounted for the passage of nineteen million barrels of oil per day. It was through Hormuz that Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE exported their product.
The strait was of such vital importance to global trade that it was patrolled by the US Navy.
The VLCC would enter the Indian Ocean once it was well away from Hormuz, circle Sri Lanka and enter the second chokepoint, the Strait of Malacca. It linked the Indian Ocean with the Pacific, between Indonesia and Malaysia. It was just over a mile and a half at its narrowest.
Once it had navigated the strait, the vessel would sail past the tip of Vietnam, past Hong Kong, through the Strait of Taiwan and twenty days later, would berth at Tianjin.
During the journey, on the open waters, the vessel would reflag itself several times, Panama, Bolivia, Liberia, countries which had a loose registry of vessels and allowed ship owners to flag to that country without any ties.
It would also go dark. It would turn off its Automatic Identification System, AIS, that continually broadcast its location. The International Maritime Organization Treaty, overseen by the United Nations, required all ships beyond a certain size to keep their AIS activated constantly. The system was critical for safety and rescue operations.
Iran was a specialist in operating its vessels in stealth mode and in selling crude to various countries while flouting the US sanctions on its oil trade.
China was its biggest customer and while that country claimed to store the Iranian oil in bonded warehouses at its ports, which were officially owned by Iran’s National Iranian Oil Company, NIOC, there was no regulation, no stock checking, no inventory reporting done by either China or by Iran. The Middle-Eastern country did not report its output or its trade to OPEC, even though it was a member of that body.
Oil analysts and experts claimed that China was sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars of Iranian oil and if it started buying those aggressively, prices could tumble.
Iran sat on ten percent of the world’s oil reserves and produced just over three million barrels a day. It lagged well behind the US which was way ahead of the pack with close to nineteen million a day. Saudi Arabia was in second place with close to twelve million a day.
It was Iran’s reserves, its smuggling operations and China, that Mostofi was counting on.