No tankers have loaded at Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export terminal, for at least a week, FT reports, citing shipping and satellite data providers,

• Satellite images showed all three loading bays at Kharg had been “empty for a sustained period”, said maritime intelligence company Windward.

Kharg Island handles the overwhelming bulk of Iranian crude exports, so a sustained halt in loadings there is functionally a removal of Iranian supply from the seaborne market rather than a marginal disruption, and episodes of this kind have historically transmitted into prompt Brent and WTI timespreads before flat price, with the front of the curve tightening first. The precedent for past Iranian export interruptions is that the initial loss is partly absorbed by sanctioned-barrel workarounds, floating storage, and dark-fleet routing, so the first question is whether loadings have genuinely stopped or merely gone off-tracker, since AIS gaps and satellite gaps have produced false reads on Iranian flows before. The distinction worth drawing is between a voluntary pause ahead of or following a geopolitical escalation and an enforced outage at the terminal itself: the former has tended to reverse quickly once tensions ebb, the latter has a longer tail and feeds refinery crude procurement in Asia, the main destination for Iranian barrels. A week's duration already separates this from routine scheduling noise. The follow-ons that matter are confirmation or denial from tanker-tracking sources, any movement in Iranian floating storage which would confirm production backing up, Chinese independent refinery buying behaviour as the principal offtake channel, and whether OPEC spare capacity holders signal any offsetting response. As a single-source report resting on third-party shipping data, it carries the usual verification caveat attached to opaque Iranian export flows.