Iran oil tankers disappear from local port amid Israel attack fears, satellite images show

Satellite imagery revealed a number of oil tankers vacating the waters around Iran’s key Kharg Island oil loading terminal, amid fears of an Israeli counterattack on Tehran’s energy infrastructure.

“The National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) appears to be fearing an imminent attack by Israel. Their empty VLCC supertankers vacated the country’s largest oil terminal, Kharg Island, yesterday,” tracking firm TankerTrackers.com wrote in a post on the X social media platform on Thursday evening.

Markets have been on edge over the possibility of an Israeli retaliation, after Iran launched a missile attack against the Jewish state earlier this week.

Satellite imagery captured by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission on Sept. 25 shows a number of VLCC (very large crude carrier) supertankers in the waters around Kharg Island, Iran’s principal oil export terminal. VLCC tankers are specifically designed to transport large volumes of crude oil.

Imagery of the same location on Oct. 3 — two days after Iran launched a volley of around 180 missiles at Israel for the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah — shows an empty sea around Kharg Island, with no ships in sight.

CNBC could not independently verify the footage.

“Please note that crude oil loadings continue, but all of the extra vacant shipping capacity has been removed from the anchorage of Kharg Island. This is the first time we see anything like this since the 2018 sanctions round,” TankerTrackers.com added in a separate X post.

Iranian tankers are known for frequently switching off their transponders and manipulating their automatic identification system (AIS) in order to conceal their movements to skirt U.S. sanctions on the country’s oil exports. This is a different kind of development, says Samir Madani, co-founder of…