The Monte Toledo oil tanker covered the uneventful voyage from Iran to Europe with a haul of 1mn barrels of crude in just 17 days, but its journey has been four years in the making.
On Sunday, the tanker became the first to deliver Iranian crude into Europe since mid-2012, when Brussels imposed an oil embargo in an attempt to force the Middle Eastern nation to negotiate the end of its nuclear programme. The ban was lifted in January as part of a broader deal that ended a decade of sanctions.
The 275-metre tanker started offloading its cargo into a refinery owned by Cia Espanola de Petroleos, near Algeciras, a few miles from Gibraltar. By midday, the vessel had already pumped to shore about a fifth of its cargo.
In southern Spain, the tanker’s arrival was met with little fanfare. It was a quiet Sunday at the refinery, and for the workers, the Monte Toledo is just one of the eight or so vessels they expect to receive this month.
Nonetheless, there’s a wider significance. As the Monte Toledo started to pump to shore through two 21-inch floating hoses connected to a giant buoy and a 1.8km submarine pipeline, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani declared in Tehran that more oil exports “will be added soon.”
Ali Tayebnia, the country’s minister of Economy and Finance, said that Iran’s oil exports will “soon return” to 2mn bpd. “Arrangements have been made for the return of Iran to the market,” he said according to Shana, the Oil Ministry’s news service.
Around Europe, other tankers with Iranian oil are close behind the Monte Toledo. In February, 29 vessels loaded crude from the Middle Eastern nation, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Of those, three are heading toward Europe - the Eurohope tanker is sailing to Constanta, an oil port in Romania, and the Atlantas is on its way to France. Another one, the Distya Akula, is anchored at the mouth of the Suez Canal, and is likely to head into a Mediterranean port.
The Monte Toledo and its companions are the vanguard in the return of Iran into the European oil market. Petro-Logistics SA, a Geneva-based tanker-tracking firm, estimated Iran exported in February about 1.4mn bpd, up 350,000 bpd from the average 2015 level.
Although the increase falls short of the 500,000 bpd that Tehran had promised, there are signs that exports into Europe will pick up this month.
“It does take a while to get those fields back up,” said Petro-Logistics director Daniel Gerber. “But I think they’re going to hit the increase of 500,000 bpd in March.”
Seth Kleinman, head of energy research at Citigroup Inc in London, agreed, saying that in addition to higher export volumes this month, more countries were buying.
“You see tankers going to Spain, Romania, Tanzania, France and the UAE,” he said. “You got an uptick to India in February too.”