The “storage clock” is ticking as tankers that exported 3.2 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil remain bottled up in Iranian ports by the U.S. Navy.
The blockade in the Gulf of Oman is a pressure-point tactic, part of a global strategy to deny Tehran $13 billion in monthly revenues and paralyze Iran’s petroleum industry by forcing it to shut down when it runs out of space to store what it can’t ship.
Since U.S. President Donald Trump imposed the blockade on April 13, at least 1.5 million barrels of Iranian oil have been stored every day because there’s no place to move it.
Those barrels are starting to pile up. According to consensus industry estimates, including by UK-based Energy Aspects, up to 68 million barrels of Iran’s 122-million-barrel maximum storage was full in late April, and there was space for 20 million to 30 million barrels more.
The squeeze is rattling Islamic Republic leaders, Trump said in an April 28 Truth Social post.
“Iran has just informed us that they are in a ‘State of Collapse,’“ the president wrote. ”They want us to ‘Open the Hormuz Strait,’ as soon as possible, as they try to figure out their leadership situation.”
The president has expressed confidence that Iran will soon meet his demands to terminate nuclear weapons development, end support for terrorist groups, and withdraw its territorial claim—and control—of the strait.
To calculate when these “state of collapse” concessions will manifest, time and space become coefficients in an equation. The answer is a so-called storage clock. It has one fulcrum constant: More time equals less space.
Kpler and JP Morgan analysts were among those in late April doing storage clock math, projecting that Iran would run out of time and space within 15 to 22 days—mid- to late May—if it can’t ship oil.
“Iran is being pushed into a storage-driven shut-in cycle,” analyst Homayoun Falakshahi wrote in a separate April 29 Kpler analysis. “Iran faces imminent forced shut-ins, with storage saturation likely within [about] 20–24 days, triggering rapid production cuts.”
Source:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/irans-oil-storage-clock-is-about-to-run-out-6019875