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The oil tanker was steaming near the coast of Guyana Recently when its location transponder started zigzagging it. It was a seemingly impossible ploy and the latest digital clue that the ship, Skipper, was trying to obscure its whereabouts and the valuable cargo stored inside its hull: millions of dollars worth of illegal crude oil.
On Wednesday, U.S. commandos seized the fast-moving 332-meter (1,090-foot) ship from helicopters — not where the ship was navigating a tracking platform, but about 360 nautical miles to the northwest, near the coast. Venezuela,
This seizure dramatically increased the President’s status donald trumpA campaign to put pressure on strongman Nicolas Maduro by cutting off access to oil revenues that have long been the lifeblood of Venezuela’s economy. It could also signal a broader US campaign to crack down on ships like the Skipper, which experts and US officials say are part of a shadowy fleet of rusting oil tankers that smuggle oil to countries facing harsh sanctions such as Venezuela. Russia And Iran.
“There are hundreds of flagless, stateless tankers that have been a lifeline for revenue, sanctioned oil revenue, for regimes like Maduro, Iran and the Kremlin,” said Michelle Weiss Bockman, a senior analyst at Windward, a maritime intelligence firm that tracks such vessels. “They can no longer function without being challenged.”
Since the first Trump administration imposed punitive oil sanctions on Venezuela in 2017, Maduro’s government has relied on numerous such oil tankers to smuggle its crude into global supply chains.
Oil ships sail in the shadows
Ships either go completely dark or “spoof” their location by altering their automatic detection systems – a mandatory safety feature designed to help avoid collisions – to navigate away across the oceans, sometimes under false flags or with fake registration information of another ship.
The expansion of the Dark Fleet follows US sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Experts say many of the ships are barely seaworthy, run without insurance and are registered with shell companies that help hide their ownership.
Experts said ships often transfer their cargo to other ships while at sea, making their origins even more obscure.
For the most part, Maduro’s government has been successful in using such tactics to get its oil to market. According to OPEC data, the country’s oil production has increased by about 25% in the past two years. Still, experts say Wednesday’s seizure could prove a turning point, foreshadowing a potential oil blockade that could stop smuggling even from some of the shipping industry’s worst actors.
“The cost of doing business with Venezuela has skyrocketed,” said Claire Jungmann, director of maritime risk and intelligence at oil analytics firm Vortexa. “These are very risk-tolerant operators, but still they don’t want to lose their rudder. Physical seizure is a completely different category of risk than juggling paperwork and bank fines.”
Captain’s last few weeks
The Skipper’s final weeks hidden in the Caribbean were reconstructed by Windward, which uses satellite imagery relied upon by US authorities to map the dark fleet’s movements.
The US had sanctioned the skipper in November 2022, when it was known as M/T Adisa, for its alleged role in a network of black vessels smuggling crude oil on behalf of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Lebanon’s Hezbollah terrorist group. The US Treasury Department said at the time that the network was allegedly run by a Switzerland-based Ukrainian oil trader, who was also sanctioned.
In recent months, ships have been sailing to China with cargoes of Iranian oil, according to Windward, and have also been linked to illicit cargo from Russia. According to Windward’s report, at the time of the seizure, the tanker was digitally manipulating its tracking signals to falsely indicate that it was sailing off the coast of Guyana, which shares a border with Venezuela, and is adjacent to a huge offshore oil field being developed by Exxon with strong US support. According to international ship registries, it is also falsely flying the Guyanese flag, a gross violation of maritime regulations.
Windward said the skipper is one of about 30 sanctioned tankers operating near Venezuela, many of them vulnerable to US interception because they have been falsely marked, making them stateless under international maritime law.
“It’s quite audacious,” said Bockman, the Windward analyst. “This is a Guyanese false flagged ship claiming to be in the Guyana oil fields. This is quite bizarre.”
There were approximately 2 million barrels of crude oil on the skipper.
The skipper departed Venezuelan waters earlier this month with about 2 million barrels of heavy crude, about half of which belonged to a Cuban state-run oil importer because the man did not have permission to share them, according to documents the state-owned company, PDVSA, provided to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
According to Francisco Monaldi, a Venezuelan oil expert at Rice University in Houston, the high risk creates big opportunities for profits – Venezuelan oil costs about $15 less per barrel on the black market than its legal crude.
Monaldi said he expected the price of illicit Venezuelan crude to fall because fewer buyers would be willing to risk having the cargo seized. However, he cautioned that it was too early to know whether the US would impose a complete blockade of Venezuelan oil, as the US did against Iraq after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
“It depends on whether this is a one-time incident or something more systematic,” he said.
The action threatens to increase oil prices
Monaldi said a potential break could hit gas prices if Trump makes additional US seizures at a time when Americans are concerned about higher living costs. Although Venezuelan oil production has fallen to less than 1% of global output due to low investment, commodity prices are extremely volatile and traders may worry that aggressive tactics in Venezuela could be adopted elsewhere, he said.
For Maduro, who called the seizure an “act of international theft,” the stakes could not be higher. Oil has long been the lifeblood of Venezuela’s economy, generating enormous wealth but also a deep dependence on natural resources. Reflecting that double-edged dependence, OPEC’s founder, a Venezuelan named Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, in 1975 called the country’s vast oil reserves “the devil’s excrement.” Oil prices fell by 2% on Thursday.
On Thursday, US-backed Venezuelan opposition leaders, Maria Corina MachadoPraised the Trump administration’s decision to seize the tanker.
“The regime is using resources, not using cash flows coming from illegal activities, including the oil black market, not to feed hungry children, not to pay for teachers earning a dollar a day, not for hospitals,” Machado told reporters in the Norwegian capital. “They use those resources to oppress and oppress our people.”
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Biesecker reported from Washington. AP writer Regina Garcia Cano contributed to this report from Caracas, Venezuela.