Minister: Iran’s Crude Oil Exports Will Not Stop

Date: 10 February 2025 - 22:37

News ID: ۱۳۶۷۵۱

TEHRAN - Iran’s Petroleum Minister Mohsen Paknejad has said that the United States will never achieve its dream of cutting Iran’s oil exports to zero as touted by its new president Donald Trump.
“Blocking Iran’s oil exports is an unattainable dream,” said Paknejad while reacting to Trump’s recent signing of an executive order to impose maximum pressure on Iran’s oil industry.
He insisted that Iran will always come up with solutions to circumvent US bans on its oil exports.
“The more the restrictions increase, the more complicated our solutions will be,” said the minister, adding that the experts and staff working in the Iranian petroleum industry have the capacities to deal with problems caused by U.S. sanctions to the country’s production and exports of oil.
He said the U.S. once experienced the futility of its maximum pressure policy on Iran during Trump’s first term in office in 2016-2020.
“They want to test it one more time and they will fail again,” said the minister.
The comments came several days after Trump announced he would use Washington’s unilateral regime of sanctions to disrupt Iran’s oil flows to markets in Asia and elsewhere.
Trump enacted a first round of sanctions on Iran’s oil exports in 2018, causing the country’s oil exports to drop for a brief period in late 2019 and in early 2020.
However, Iranian oil exports have gradually returned to pre-sanctions levels in recent years with estimates suggesting that the country is shipping more than 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil, mostly to customers in China.
That comes as Iran’s oil exports had reached as low as 0.3 million bpd in 2019 when Trump removed sanction waivers granted to major Iranian oil customers.