Gulf oil exports tops pre-war levels amid ships facing unpredictable threats

Gulf oil exporters topped pre-war levels for about half of September, shipping data showed on Monday, though attacks on tankers and logistical constraints cloud the outlook for sustained higher flows.Ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz face a “heightened and increasingly unpredictable kinetic threat” given the recent sharp increase in traffic, Marisks, a shipping intelligence service, said on Saturday.The seven-day moving average for crude exports from the region was 18.3 million barrels per day on Sept.30, provisional data from Kpler showed, with volumes topping pre-war levels on 14 days in September.That included Gulf oil sent Hormuz, via the Red Sea, and from terminals and ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman.Shipments had earlier matched or exceeded pre-war levels on a handful of days in June and July, Kpler data showed, after Washington and Tehran reached a memorandum of understanding that has since lapsed.Crude exports from the region averaged about 18 million bpdin the 12 months before the start of the US-Israeli war with Iran, according to Kpler.The recent export surge has been driven by Saudi Arabia loading from both the Red Sea and the Gulf, three weeks after a Sept.

10 attack on its East-West pipeline, Kpler said.It has required more supertankers to shuttle crude through Hormuz, trade sources and analysts have said, adding that ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman have reached their limits.Iraq’s state-owned Oil Tanker Company and some refiners have chartered tankers to load Basrah crude inside the strait after Baghdad secured Iranian permission in August for Iraqi oil tankers to pass through Hormuz.Shipping data provider Vortexa also said Gulf flows have recovered.It said that the 14-day moving average for Middle East crude and condensate exports hit 18.6 million bpd, exceeding the 10-year seasonal average and returning to pre-conflict levels.“Most of this month-over-month increase seen in September comes from Saudi Arabia, which ...