Venezuela’s oil exports fell to their lowest levels since the 1940s in October, as some of Petroleos de Venezuela’s last remaining clients halted trade with the company ahead of a deadline imposed by the United States. Common tactics that vessels now employ include using multiple transfers from one ship to another to disguise the origin of each cargo, traveling to Venezuela with their location transponders switched off to avoid detection, and frequently changing their names, flags, operators and owners. So far in November, nine tankers have loaded almost 6 million barrels of Venezuelan crude and fuel for exports, according to internal PDVSA documents. That amounts to more than 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) so far in November. In October, Venezuela’s oil exports plummeted to 359,000 bpd, the lowest level since early 1940s.
Five other Cameroonian-flagged tankers, with the capacity to lift millions of barrels of oil, are crossing the Atlantic towards Venezuela with their Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) turned off, according to vessel-tracking service TankerTrackers.com. Most of those vessels have touched Venezuelan ports at least once this year. PDVSA is also preparing to send this month several tankers that it had hired for domestic transportation under time-charter contracts to exports destinations, a strategy it began in August after some vessel owners stopped shipping Venezuelan oil due to sanctions. In addition, two China-flagged very large crude carriers (VLCC) owned by PetroChina Co Ltd – able to transport some 2 million barrels of crude each – are in Venezuelan waters near PDVSA’s Jose terminal waiting to load, Refinitiv Eikon data show. The Xingye and Thousand Sunny are signaling their destination as Aruba – common practice for tankers sailing to Venezuela since sanctions were implemented. PDVSA’s Petromonagas and Petrosinovensa projects in the Orinoco – joint ventures with Russian and Chinese state firms, respectively – restarted output late in the third quarter and were together producing some 93,000 bpd of crude in mid-October, a PDVSA document showed. Petrosinovensa also had two blending trains active to produce exportable Merey crude as of Nov. 9.