Iran's Leaders Turn to Old Supertanker to Survive US Blockade

Iran deployed a 30-year-old oil tanker for the first time in years to act as emergency floating storage as the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports throttles its exports, a sanctions monitoring group said.

The large crude carrier Nasha, which can hold up to 2 million barrels of oil, was visible on public ship-tracking services last week as it sailed in the Persian Gulf toward Kharg Island, Iran's main export terminal.

On Sunday, satellite imagery showed the supertanker, which measures nearly 1,100 feet long, loading at Kharg's western jetty, but it was no longer there on Wednesday, analysts at the nonprofit United Against Nuclear Iran said.

Its reactivation may point to mounting pressure on Iran's oil industry-a major economic lifeline-as the ongoing U.S. blockade amid the 2-month-old war restricts Tehran's exports and forces it to store rather than sell its energy.

Iran still has 18 empty supertankers that it can call on as floating storage, analysts at TankerTrackers.com said in an update this week.

But the real challenge will be to exit the U.S. blockade area, something no Iranian tanker has managed thus far.

U.S. Blockade Is Working

While Nasha was loading at Kharg on Sunday, another tanker was seen doing the same at its eastern jetty. A separate satellite photograph taken on the same day showed a cluster of nearly 20 laden tankers anchored off the island's coast, in a sign of the oil bottleneck.

U.S. Central Command said on Tuesday that it had contained more than 20 ships at Iran's Chabahar port on the Gulf of Oman, a claim Newsweek verified by reviewing publicly available satellite imagery.

At least half the ships confined to the area were tankers laden with Iranian crude oil, according to TankerTrackers.com.

Prior to last week, the Nasha had not been seen publicly since it briefly broadcast its location off the coast of Nigeria in October 2024, according to Newsweek's analysis of historical transponder data.

Years of international sanctions against Iran have caused a boom in the secondhand tanker market. Instead of scrapping old ships, owners are selling them to intermediaries in Tehran's "ghost" fleet network. The vessels often are uninsured, poorly maintained and pose major environment risks.

Iran Is Running Out of Storage Tanks-and Time

The Nasha, built in 1996, might buy Iran an extra day or two of production, but output is already being reduced as available storage approaches capacity, commodities analysts at Kpler said this week.

Iran might be able to stretch its oil storage much further than can many of its neighbors, out of necessity. Even then, Kpler estimates that it has about 20 days left of onshore and floating storage before it is forced to adopt more extreme measures to avoid shutting its wells.

More than 90 percent of Iranian crude goes to small refineries in China at prices lower than the Brent index.

With about 150 million barrels of Iranian crude already eastbound before the U.S. blockade began, Tehran will continue to receive payments in the coming months, but it might lose up to 250 million per day in revenue by mid-May, according to Kpler.

U.S. President Donald Trump doubling down on the naval blockade against Iranian ports is designed to force Tehran to the negotiating table, but it is also being used by the hardline Revolutionary Guard to maintain its own closure of the Strait of Hormuz to most commercial traffic.

Before the outbreak of war on February 28, when the U.S. and Israel launched strikes in Iran, up to one-quarter of the world's seaborne oil trade flowed through the strait-about 20 million barrels a day. Flows in April were close to 1 million barrels per day, Kpler said on Thursday.

Ship transits through the strait remain in single digits, down from the prewar average of 138 per day, according to PortWatch, a tracker maintained by the International Monetary Fund and Oxford University.

"Iran can't get their act together,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Wednesday. “They don't know how to sign a nonnuclear deal. They better get smart soon!"

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This story was originally published April 30, 2026 at 10:36 AM.