Arab News | Kuwait Petroleum offering ship-to-ship transfers outside Hormuz to buyers, official says

SINGAPORE: Kuwait Petroleum Corp is offering the option of ship-to-ship transfers outside the Strait of Hormuz to its buyers for safe transportation to final destinations, a company official said on Wednesday.

“Whenever it is safe, we are passing some ships through the Strait of Hormuz and we are giving options to ‌do STS (ship-to-ship) ‌operations outside the Strait ‌of Hormuz,” Emad A. M. Al-Kandari, deputy managing director of International Marketing at Kuwait Petroleum Corp, said at the APPEC industry conference.

Al-Kandari did not specify which petroleum products were sold under STS operations.

The company recently offered naphtha on a delivered ex-ship basis ‌in a handful ‌of tenders in August and September, ‌documents reviewed by Reuters showed.

Some of its ‌cargoes were sold at premiums of up to $60 per ton to Japan quotes on a delivered basis, market sources said. KPC ‌typically offered naphtha on a free-on-board basis before the U.S.-Iran war started. It resumed cargo offers in June for the first time since the war began in February. Kuwait exported about 200,000 barrels per day of naphtha on average in the first two months of this year, which tanked to zero in April, data from shiptracker Kpler showed. Its exports in the last two months have remained half of pre-war levels.