US forces on Saturday apprehended a second merchant vessel carrying oil off the coast of Venezuela in international waters in the midst of an American blockade against the country’s oil, according to the US homeland security department.
The stoppage follows the seizure by US forces of another oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast on 10 December. Both vessels were headed to Asia.
The British maritime risk management company Vanguard told Reuters that the vessel was believed to be the Panama-flagged Centuries and was intercepted east of Barbados in the Caribbean Sea.
The vessel does not appear to be on the list of US-sanctioned vessels, according to multiple reports, which would represent an escalation in American enforcement of its blockade.
In a post on X Saturday afternoon, the US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the US Coast Guard and the defense department had stopped the tanker early Saturday morning in “pre-dawn action”.
“The United States will continue to pursue the illicit movement of sanctioned oil that is used to fund narco-terrorism in the region,” Noem said. “We will find you, and we will stop you.”
The administration has suggested that any vessel carrying Venezuelan oil could be subject to the US blockade and has been working to expand its list of sanctioned vessels.
The first oil tanker that the US seized earlier in the month was on the sanctions list and was what the White House called a “sanctioned shadow vessel known for carrying black-market sanctioned oil”.
The development comes as Trump and his advisers have refused to rule out the potential for open conflict with Venezuela as its country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, has urged his navy to escort oil tankers, defying the largest US fleet deployed in the region in decades.
After the first oil tanker was seized, the Venezuelan government said in a statement that the US had committed “blatant theft” and described the action as “an act of international piracy”.
In an interview broadcast on Friday morning, Trump told NBC News that going to war with Maduro’s regime remains on the table. “I don’t rule it out, no,” he said in a phone interview with the network.
The US further ratcheted up pressure on Venezuela this week, accusing the country of taking US oil and saying the US lost out on investments in the country. “You remember they took all of our energy rights,” Trump said. “They took all of our oil not that long ago. And we want it back. They took it – they illegally took it.” On Tuesday, the US president ordered a “total and complete” blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela.
On Thursday, the US military carried out its latest lethal strike on a vessel it said was engaged in drug trafficking in the eastern Pacific, killing four people, and bringing the death toll to 99 in its campaign of striking alleged drug-trafficking boats since September.
Maduro claims the US seeks regime change instead of its stated goal of stopping drug trafficking.
The Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, waded into the dispute on Wednesday, declaring that the United Nations was “nowhere to be seen” and asked that it step up to “prevent any bloodshed”.
Jeremy Paner, former US sanctions investigator, told Reuters the seizure of the vessel Saturday “marks a further increase in Trump’s pressure on Venezuela”.
“It also runs counter to Trump’s statement that the US would impose a blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers,” he said.
Since the first seizure, Venezuelan crude exports have fallen sharply. While many vessels picking up oil in Venezuela are under sanctions, others transporting the country’s oil and crude from Iran and Russia have not been sanctioned, and some companies, particularly Chevron in the US, transport Venezuelan oil in their own authorized ships.
China is the biggest buyer of Venezuelan crude, which accounts for roughly 4% of its imports, with shipments in December on track to average more than 600,000 barrels per day, analysts have said.
For now, the oil market is well-supplied and there are millions of barrels of oil on tankers off the coast of China waiting to offload. If the embargo stays in place for some time, then the loss of nearly a million barrels a day of crude supply is likely to push oil prices higher.
Since the US imposed energy sanctions on Venezuela in 2019, traders and refiners buying Venezuelan oil have resorted to a “shadow fleet” of tankers that disguise their location and to vessels sanctioned for transporting Iranian or Russian oil.
The dark or shadow fleet is considered exposed to possible punitive measures from the US, shipping analysts have said. Centuries, which loaded in Venezuela under the false name “Crag” and is part of the dark fleet, was carrying some 1.8m barrels of Venezuelan Merey crude oil bound for China, according to internal documents from state oil company PDVSA, the oil’s seller.
The vessel departed Venezuelan waters on Wednesday after being briefly escorted by the Venezuelan navy, according to company sources and satellite images obtained by TankerTrackers.com.
The crude was bought by Satau Tijana Oil Trading, one of many intermediaries involved in PDVSA’s sales to Chinese independent refiners, the documents showed.
As of this week, of more than 70 oil tankers in Venezuelan waters that are part of the shadow fleet, around 38 are under sanctions by the US treasury, according to data from TankerTrackers.com. Of those, at least 15 are loaded with crude and fuel, it added.
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