Saudi Arabia’s national oil company Aramco began loading cargoes of crude oil at its massive Ras Tanura terminal on Friday – apparently a vote of confidence that shipping from the Persian Gulf will resume, even after Iran attacked a Taiwanese cargo ship on Thursday.
Ras Tanura is a city in eastern Saudi Arabia, situated on a peninsula that juts out into the Persian Gulf. This makes it ideally situated to serve as the kingdom’s primary oil loading terminal, with enough capacity to handle supertankers. Ras Tanura also boasts a massive oil refinery and storage complex. As of late 2025, the port was generating about 6 million barrels per day (bpd) in oil exports.
Operations at Ras Tanura were severely cut back in March after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, which is the only way for oil tankers to depart from the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia kept oil flowing through pipelines to its Red Sea port of Yanbu, but Ras Tanura was largely shut down.
On Thursday, Bloomberg News cited ship tracking data that showed two Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) owned by Saudi Arabia’s national shipping company Bahri were moving toward Ras Tanura’s loading area, while a third had already arrived.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Friday that two of the supertankers have begun loading crude oil, and the third appears to be standing by. Each of the ships can carry about 2 million barrels of oil.
Thursday marked the first time a tanker has loaded oil from Ras Tanura since March 8. Even with its Red Sea ports operational, Saudi Arabia’s total output has been cut almost in half over the past three months, from 7 million bpd to 4 million bpd.
Reuters pointed to rumors that Aramco will announce a sharp cut to oil prices next week as exports ramp up from both Saudi Arabia and its competitors.
Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have all begun soliciting buyers for oil shipments, while Iran – liberated from sanctions by its Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the United States – appears ready to load two VLCCs of its own.
Industry analysts said exports have recovered by about 2 million bpd in total since the MOU was announced, the amount of oil trapped in the Persian Gulf is down by a comparable amount, and exports are on track to return to pre-war levels by the end of 2026.