"Why Should We Care About the World’s Blocked Oil Artery?"
This week we welcome back maritime historian Dr. Sal @mercoglianos - Campbell University professor, former merchant mariner, and host of the popular YouTube channel “What’s Going on with Shipping?” - to unpack the two-month-old crisis that has bottled up hundreds of ships inside the Persian Gulf and pushed the U.S. Navy to seize tankers thousands of miles away in the Indian Ocean.
Sal lays out what he calls a “tale of two blockades”: Iran rerouting traffic into its own territorial waters, shaking down shipping companies for multimillion-dollar transit payments on an international waterway and seizing vessels, while the U.S. mounts a blockade from the Northern Arabian Sea, firing inert shells at the Iranian container ship M/V Touska and boarding stateless tankers in the Indian Ocean under U.S. Department of Justice warrants.
We dig into the Venezuela vessel seizure precedent, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the return of mine warfare, and why ship owners aren’t budging even with insurance on offer. Sal explains how ship-to-ship transfers off East Johor, Malaysia launder sanctioned Iranian crude, and why that anchorage could be the next target of U.S. enforcement.
He also walks through the pressure building inside Iran: storage tanks filling, old supertankers towed out of retirement at Kharg Island, and the looming prospect of permanently damaging Iran’s aging low-pressure oil wells. We also discuss the ripple effects reaching Pakistan, India, Africa, and Southeast Asia - refineries shutting down, fertilizer supplies choked, and bunker fuel prices doubling - plus the quiet winner: Russia.
Links to the full episode below.
English
