Tanker loading in Venezuela dropped to a minimum on Monday, with most ships carrying oil shipments only between national ports after US measures against two ships near the coast of the OPEC country, according to maritime data and sources.
The Coast Guard The United States seized this month sanctioned a supertanker carrying Venezuelan crude and attempted to intercept two other vessels linked to Venezuela over the weekend, U.S. authorities said.
One of them is an empty ship sanctioned by the United States and the other is an unsanctioned tanker that was fully loaded, bound for China. Washington has not provided updated information on the vessels intercepted over the weekend.
However, the blockade announced last week by US President Donald Trump on all sanctioned tankers that enter or leave Venezuela has kept shipowners on alert.
Panamanian Foreign Minister Javier Martínez-Achá said in a television interview on Monday that the supertanker Centuries, which was flying the Panamanian flag when it was intercepted on Saturday, did not respect the country’s maritime regulations and altered its name and disconnected his geolocator while transporting a shipment of oil from Venezuela.
A country that flags a ship officially included in its registry can cancel the ship’s registration if an investigation determines that it did not comply with maritime regulations.
Trump’s pressure campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has included an increase in military presence in the region and more than two dozen military attacks against boats that, according to the United States, transport drugs in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Seanear the South American nation. At least 100 people have died in those attacks.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday that Washington’s goal was to ensure regional stability and security, adding that “the current status quo with the Venezuelan regime is intolerable for the United States.”
Oil prices rise
The ship interceptions have dealt the hardest blow to PDVSA since the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the company’s former commercial intermediaries, two units of Russia’s Rosneft, in 2020, forcing it to cut production and exports.
Brent crude futures rose 2.4% to $61.94 a barrel on Monday afternoon, while U.S. WTI crude rose 2.4% to $57.89 following U.S. actions and amid Russia’s war against Ukraine. Both developments have raised fears of supply disruptions.
On Monday, Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA had delivered a shipment of 1.9 million barrels of heavy crude oil to the sanctioned Aruba-flagged Azure Voyager vessel in the port of Jose, in northeastern Venezuela, but no other supertanker bound for Asia was scheduled to charge soon, according to internal company documents.
The number of loaded tankers that have not set sail has increased in recent days, leaving millions of barrels of Venezuelan oil stranded on ships, while customers demand greater discounts and contractual changes to undertake risky voyages beyond the country’s waters.
Some tankers approaching the Venezuelan coast, either to load export oil or deliver imported naphtha, have also recently turned back or suspended navigation until their shipowners clarify loading instructions, according to LSEG monitoring data on Monday.
PDVSA is slowly restoring some systems and resorting to manual logs after a cyberattack last week.
The company has not been able to fully restore its centralized administrative system and many workers have not received their salaries on time, according to sources.
PDVSA and Venezuela’s Oil Ministry have not responded to requests for comment. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil said on Monday that US seizures contravene international law and constitute “acts of piracy.”
China’s Foreign Ministry said Monday that recent U.S. interceptions constitute a serious violation of international law.
Chevron, PDVSA’s main partner, exported on Sunday a shipment of 500,000 barrels of Venezuelan oil bound for the US coast of the Gulf of Mexico on one of its vessels, under US authorization, according to data from LSEG.
Venezuelan Hydrocarbons Minister Delcy Rodríguez said on Sunday that Venezuela had not interrupted deliveries to Chevron. The company has exported seven shipments of Venezuelan oil to the United States this month, each containing between 300,000 and 500,000 barrels, according to monitoring data.
Persecuted by the US
The empty Bella 1 supertanker, which the U.S. Coast Guard attempted to intercept on Sunday as it approached Venezuela, was adrift northeast of Bermuda in the Caribbean on Monday, a satellite image obtained by TankerTrackers.com showed.
A US official told Reuters on Sunday that the tanker had not been boarded and that interceptions could take different forms, including sailing or flying near ships in question.
The loaded Skipper ship, the first seized this month by the United States, arrived on Sunday in an area near the port of Galveston, Texas, for the transfer of cargo, according to maritime sources. Guyana claimed last week that the tanker had falsely used its flag.
Together, Skipper, Centuries and Bella 1 have exported a total of 41 million barrels of crude oil and fuels from Iran and Venezuela, according to TankerTrackers.com.
