Ship tracking services said on Monday that three tankers filled with liquefied natural gas (LNG) passed safely through the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend, headed for Pakistan, China, and India.
A fourth tanker loaded with Iraqi crude oil for China also appears to have passed through the strait after spending almost three months trapped in the Persian Gulf.
The tankers were observing various degrees of evasive protocols, including shutting down or spoofing their electronic tracking signals, so some of the work done by tracking services LSEG and Kpler relied on extrapolating from their last known positions.
The most reliable set of tracking data for the four ships concerned the LNG tanker Fuwairit, which passed safely through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday and is expected to arrive in Pakistan on Tuesday.
The Fuwairit sailed under the flag of the Bahamas, carrying LNG loaded from the Ras Laffan port in Qatar in late March. The ship is owned by Mitsui O.S.K. Lines of Japan, which refused to comment on its movements or how it secured safe passage through a waterway haunted by Iranian terrorist attacks.
The second LNG tanker, Al Rayyan, also loaded gas at Ras Laffan. It was spotted in the Persian Gulf on May 22, went completely dark for the next three days, and reappeared on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, sailing past Oman’s port of Muscat en route to China.
The Al Rayyan, which is owned by Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha and operated by Qatar’s state-owned national energy company QatarEnergy, is now expected to arrive in China on June 27. Neither the owner nor operator was willing to answer media inquiries about how the ship made it through the Strait of Hormuz.
The third LNG tanker, Al Hamra, has been off ship tracking displays for the longest, having gone dark after April 19. It suddenly reappeared on Saturday off the coast of India, becoming the first ship headed for India from the Persian Gulf to make it past the Strait of Hormuz since Iran’s terror attacks began. India normally gets almost half of its LNG from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), but those flows were reduced to zero when Iran closed the strait.
According to Kpler, the Al Hamra was empty when it disappeared, but at some point since April 19 it was able to load LNG from the Das Island export facility, which is operated by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) of the UAE. Numerous ships have been visually observed taking on cargoes from Das Island with their transponders switched off.
The Al Hamra became the third ship owned by ADNOC Logistics and Services to pass through the Strait of Hormuz since the Iran crisis began. The other two sailed to Japan and China, while the Al Hamra is bound for western India.
ADNOC also declined media requests for comment on how its ship was able to pass unmolested through the strait.
The fourth ship to clear the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend was the Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) Eagle Verona, which completed its passage on Saturday and is headed for the eastern Chinese port of Ningbo.
The Eagle Verona is flagged to Singapore, owned by Malaysian state shipping company MISC, and has been chartered by the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, widely known as Sinopec. The ship is carrying roughly 2 million barrels of Iraqi crude oil. As with the other owners and operators, Sinopec and MISC declined to comment on its passage through the Strait of Hormuz.
Maritime intelligence firm Windward AI – which carefully studies the evasive tactics employed by “shadow fleet tankers,” and frequently criticizes the hazards posed to other ships by their activities – said on Monday that the VLCC Eagle Verona passed through the Strait of Hormuz under a heavy cloud of electronic warfare tactics, including GPS jamming and deliberate disabling of its Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) to “mitigate targeting risks during the high-stakes exit.”
This report would suggest that the Eagle Verona, at least, did not transit the Strait with the knowledge and cooperation Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which has reportedly demanded heavy ransom payments to allow some ships to escape from the Persian Gulf.
Windward said on Monday that its data suggests a complex “multi-node staging architecture” has appeared off the coast of Iran, including multiple tankers going dark and sailing very close to the Iranian coastline, in an apparent effort by Iran to circumvent the U.S. blockade.
Meanwhile, the UAE port of Fujairah reportedly loaded a South Korean VLCC with 1.35 million barrels of crude oil on Sunday, possibly in anticipation of the Strait of Hormuz reopening under a deal between the United States and Iran.