When will Australia call last drinks at Duqm, the Omani tanker cantina?

Situated on the coast of Oman, with the desert on one side and the Arabian Sea on the other, Duqm is a desolate place.

Once a fishing village, this port now serves a newly built oil refinery. A modern oil export terminal is located on one side of the man-made basin. At the other end is the Duqm dry dock. Built just 15 years ago to provide service and maintenance facilities for shipping, its current clientele looks more like a marine Tatooine cantina scene. like Star Wars version, the dry dock is a desert-side magnet for misfits and incompetents.

More than half of the tankers are sanctioned for their role in Russia’s oil trade. These outlaw ships are his so-called “shadow fleet”.

Shadow fleet tankers routinely transport Russian oil to buyers happy to pay above the upper price limit set by G7+ countries, including Australia.

Critics call it “blood oil” because some of the money spent in Australia goes to the Russian war machine.

Australia’s imports from Indian refineries using Russian crude more than doubled between September and October. Energy and Clean Air Research Center (CREA), a European non-profit group that monitors the market.

CREA estimates Australia imported $3.8 billion of oil refined from Russian crude between February 2023 and June 2025, generating $2 billion in tax revenue for the Kremlin.

Tracking tankers can be as simple as checking Flightradar24.com before heading to the airport to get the location of Grandma’s flight. As with the Qantas flight, each tanker must transmit its position and other critical data using the Automatic Identification System required under the International Maritime Organization’s International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS). However, unlike flight trackers, obtaining a tanker’s location is complicated by the tanker’s proximity to land-based receivers and the limited public availability of satellite receiver data.

Shadow fleet tankers often add another layer of opacity. They frequently change their names, ownership, and flags of convenience to avoid scrutiny. It is not uncommon for these ships to conduct ship-to-ship cargo transfers over water or spoof GPS locations to confuse tracking. GPS can be blocked by fighters using powerful radio emitters in regions such as the Black Sea. Unlike Grandma’s flight, signals can disappear for weeks, only to reappear near their destination on the other side of the world.

The water supply for these questionable tankers in Oman is located adjacent to the UK Joint Logistics Support Base, a facility built to support the UK’s naval operations in the Indian Ocean and Middle East.

Six of the sanctioned tankers currently at Duqm are part of Australia’s 2025 oil products supply chain through India.

The Gulf of Kutch is located on the northwestern coast of India, just across the Arabian Sea. Among the many oil refineries in this region, Reliance Industries’ Jamnagar refinery stands out. This is the largest such facility in the world, enjoying the Indian government’s choice to ignore international sanctions against Russia. Jamnagar’s Russian diet has grown to more than 50 percent of its raw material, from almost none before the 2022 invasion.

India currently ranks fourth in Australia’s supply of imported refined petroleum products, with Jamnagar supplying almost all of this supply. 10 percent of our imported refined product comes from this refinery, and half of that product comes from Russian oil fields operated mostly by the Kremlin-controlled oil company Rosneft.

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I follow the following reporterReliance Industries recently announced that it will stop buying Russian oil from its Jamnagar export refinery and will no longer use Russian crude to produce gasoline and diesel that it sells to Australia.

The Australian government sees the purification process as a sanctifying act. When oil companies import fuel from India, Australia detects and certifies that it is of Indian origin. In doing so, it ignores the antiquated supply lines that create the material.

The previous Duqm boss sets a good example. This tanker may now be known as Blint, but before Oman the ship was also known as Jaguar, Argent, Signal Puma, S Puma and Primo Stealth. Perhaps it is easier to use the International Maritime Organization’s number 9293002.

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The register flag is similarly variable. While traveling to Oman under the flag of Comoros, it had the pleasure of operating under appropriate flags from Gabon to Guinea-Bissau; Landlocked Mongolia for several weeks in 2023 was the most absurd.

IMO9293002, under various names and flags, has transported oil from Russia’s Baltic ports to the Gulf of Kutch a half-dozen times in the past two years.

By early 2025, things were getting messy. As Jaguar, the tanker had delivered a further 107,000 tonnes of Russian oil to Jamnagar, where it was processed and sold to buyers including Australia. Jaguar moved its registration from Gabon to Guinea-Bissau. Guinea-Bissau canceled registration. The Jaguar returned to Gabon and its registration was later canceled due to the tanker’s commercial activities in Russia.

After the tanker returned to Russia via the Baltic Sea, the Estonian navy tried to inspect the ship, which did not have citizenship. While accompanying him in Estonian waters, Russian warplane briefly entered Estonian airspace and intervened. This resulted in a Portuguese F-16 being scrambled in response.

This was an interaction with potentially serious consequences: an interaction that occurred because of the ongoing oil trade between Russia and India. This is a trade supported by Australia’s imports of petroleum products from third-party refineries.

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After renaming Blint, the tanker made another delivery of Russian oil to Jamnagar. “Going dark” in the Baltic and again in the Red Sea, the ship enjoyed a rest at the Omani cantina for rebel tankers in Duqm before heading towards the Gulf of Suez.

Meanwhile, tankers carrying “blood oil” from Jamnagar continue to arrive in Australia. Proteus Bohemia was the last boat to arrive at Botany Bay this week, followed by Nordmarlin in early December. Ours is a market that manipulates Russia’s oil trade with India using shadow fleet tankers. Australia’s sanctions this week on a further 45 tankers is an inadequate response given that all shadow activities are on the high seas outside Australia’s jurisdiction.

The European Union is imposing sanctions against Russia’s oil trade through third-party refineries in January 2026. England does the same.

At what point will Australia call for last drinks in the Omani tanker cantina?

Mark Corrigan is a chemical engineer with knowledge of global oil movements. He became a part of: reporterThe ‘Blood Oil’ series features him as an active campaigner against the use of Russian oil in Australia.

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