Azerbaijan, Baku, May 16/ Trend F.Milad/
Iran has rejected the International Energy Agency's report, which says that the country has stored up to 30 million barrels of unsold crude oil in oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.
National Iranian Oil Company's director for International Affairs Mohsen Qamsari told Mehr News Agency that there is no stored oil without customer in Iranian tankers. The official said that 12 new tankers, which have been recently purchased by the Iranian tanker fleet, will not be used to store crude oil.
Iran's oil production remained steady at 3.3 million barrels a day in April, but 15%- 25% of that oil wasn't sold and had to be pumped into floating tanker storage, the IEA said, a process the country could continue for a couple of months before filling its storage and having to shut down fields, David Fyfe, head of the IEA's oil markets division, said.
"There is enough room between the level of OPEC production and the level of the call on OPEC [oil] to allow for a greater disruption to Iranian supplies," Olivier Jakob, Managing Director of consultancy Petromatrix, said.
In order to either dodge sanctions or obscure their impact, Iran's fleet of oil tankers have started to play "hide and seek" by disabling their tracking beacons, the IEA said in its monthly oil market report.
Out of 38 Iranian oil tankers, only one is currently broadcasting its location, according the tracking service Marine Traffic. The lack of data makes it difficult to precisely determine how badly the sanctions are affecting Iran's oil earnings.
In official submissions to OPEC, the Iranian authorities claim to have actually increased oil production by 38,000 barrels a day since the new sanctions were agreed in January, to 3.8 million barrels a day in April. OPEC's own analysts, using secondary data sources, estimate that Iran's oil production has fallen by 152,000 barrels a day since January to 3.2 million barrels a day in April.
Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi on Tuesday rejected the IEA report, adding that Iran's oil export has not been declined.