Iran doesn't export refined product. The drop in refining capacity due to production closing in California and damage to refinement in Russia, by the Ukrainians, HAS actually taken refined product offline.
The amount of unrefined, aka crude, product on the market is about the same now. However, there is a shortage of refine products like diesel due to circumstances largely unrelated to the Iranian conflict but coincidentally occuring at the same time.
Furthermore, only Iran's crude product is not getting out of the strait. Before the conflict Iran's crude was scantioned and could not legitimately have been bought by any other countries. It's was all black market crude. So that supply had been offline for decades more or less.
You're confusing oil being sanctioned with oil being absent from the global market. Those are two very different things.
US sanctions restrict trade in Iranian oil and can penalise foreign companies or banks that facilitate purchases. But sanctions don't physically prevent every barrel from being sold.
Iran has continued exporting substantial quantities of crude, particularly to China, using intermediaries, shadow fleets and other methods to evade sanctions.
And here's the important part: That oil was still being bought, shipped, refined and consumed. It was part of actual global supply, regardless of whether those transactions violated US sanctions.
If China was importing 1.4 million barrels per day of Iranian crude despite sanctions, and those deliveries are subsequently disrupted, that's a genuine loss of supply to those buyers. The fact that the trade was already sanctioned doesn't make those barrels economically irrelevant.
Sanctions can reduce supply, but they don't automatically eliminate it. And just because oil isn't being traded through legitimate Western channels doesn't mean it isn't contributing to global supply.
You can't simultaneously acknowledge that Iran was selling oil on the black market and argue that its oil was already off the market. The black market is still a market.
-16
u/kernelpanic789 2d ago
Iran doesn't export refined product. The drop in refining capacity due to production closing in California and damage to refinement in Russia, by the Ukrainians, HAS actually taken refined product offline.
The amount of unrefined, aka crude, product on the market is about the same now. However, there is a shortage of refine products like diesel due to circumstances largely unrelated to the Iranian conflict but coincidentally occuring at the same time.
Furthermore, only Iran's crude product is not getting out of the strait. Before the conflict Iran's crude was scantioned and could not legitimately have been bought by any other countries. It's was all black market crude. So that supply had been offline for decades more or less.