These recently included moves against the methods by which Beijing previously continued to import vast quantities of Iranian oil at deeply discounted prices under the terms of the ‘Iran-China 25-Year Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement’, as first revealed anywhere in the world in my 3 September 2019 article on the subject and fully detailed in my latest book on the new global oil market order. So unashamedly proud was Iran of these and other efforts to outfox the U.S.’s sanctions on these oil exports that in December 2018 at the Doha Forum, Iran’s then-Foreign Minister, Mohammad Zarif, stated that: “If there is an art that we have perfected in Iran, [that] we can teach to others for a price, it is the art of evading sanctions.” Towards the end of 2020, Iran’s then-Petroleum Minister himself, Bijan Zangeneh, added a little detail to one such tried-and-trusted method: “What we export is not under Iran’s name. At the moment, the rate of recovery across both sets of fields from Iran’s side is at best 4.5% However, before the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018, several international oil companies presented realistic plans to Iran’s Petroleum Ministry detailing how they would increase the average rate of recovery at the West Karoun and shared fields in the first instance to at least 12.5% within one year, to 20% within two years and to 50% within five years.
Author: Simon Watkins
Published at: 2025-04-02 22:00:00
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