The LNG tanker Mubaraz crossed the Strait of Hormuz for the first time since the end of February, moving back through the waterway after spending weeks idling in the Persian Gulf. The Liberian-flagged vessel had stopped transmitting its location on March 31, and the latest tracking information available for it had been from late March.
reported that Mubaraz loaded at the UAE's Das Island and is signaling a Chinese port as its final destination, with arrival expected in mid-May. By the time of the report, the tanker had exited the Strait of Hormuz and was nearing India's shores.
The voyage matters because the Strait of Hormuz had been effectively closed to LNG flows since the war between the U.S. and Israel, and Iran began at the end of February. That de facto closure stranded all Qatari and UAE supplies of LNG, and QatarEnergy declared force majeure on contracts after Iranian missile attacks damaged Qatar's LNG capacity. The disruption pushed Asia's imports of LNG to multi-year lows.
This weekend brought another sign of how deep the damage runs. The 30-day moving average of net LNG shipments to Asia fell below 600,000 tons, the lowest one-month moving average of LNG arrivals into Asia since June 2020, when the Covid pandemic crashed demand. Mubaraz is moving again, but the route it is taking shows how slowly supply is coming back.
