Maritime documents showed that on Monday, Venezuela’s state-run oil company PDVSA was loading a supertanker with crude oil and fuel for Cuba. This was an unusually large amount to help Venezuela’s political ally Cuba get through an energy crisis with frequent blackouts.
After a few big power outages this year, many Cubans are worried about how much power they will have this summer, when they will turn on their air conditioners to stay cool in the Caribbean heat.
Cuban officials say that the power outages are caused by problems with processing heavy, sour Cuban crude and a lack of fuel on the island, which gets most of its fuel from Venezuela.
Last year, a big fire destroyed part of the country’s largest oil terminal, Matanzas. This has made it hard to unload imported fuel.
This week, the supertanker Nolan, which is registered in Panama, is bringing 400,000 barrels of fuel oil to Venezuela’s Jose terminal. This oil will be used to make electricity. Documents from PDVSA show that it will also load 1.13 million barrels of heavy oil from Venezuela, bringing the total cargo to 1.53 million barrels. Later this month, the ship will leave port.
Since the Matanzas fire, Cuba has lost a lot of its ability to take in big tankers. One of the documents showed that the Nolan is going to Matanzas, where Cuban state companies have been unloading imports by moving cargo to smaller ships in ship-to-ship operations.
In an effort to avoid its own fuel crisis, Venezuela cut the amount of oil it sent to Cuba by about 6%, to 53,600 barrels per day (bpd), based on tanker movement.
The Nigerian company Thomarose Global Ventures Ltd, which owns Nolan, was put on a blacklist by the U.S. Treasury Department in November. The company was accused of being part of an international oil smuggling network that helped Hezbollah and Iran’s Quds Force trade oil.
When asked for a comment, PDVSA, Venezuela’s oil ministry, and Cuba’s Center for International Press did not respond right away. Thomarose Global Ventures could not be reached for a comment.
Refinitiv Eikon vessel monitoring data shows that the tanker has not sent a signal from its transponder since the middle of December while it was in Venezuela.
