President Donald Trump on Sunday said that Iran has mere days before its oil infrastructure could explode.
“What happens is that line explodes from within. Both mechanically and in the earth, something happens where it just explodes, and they say they only have about three days left before that happens,” he said during an appearance on Fox News’s The Sunday Briefing. “And when it explodes, you can never rebuild it the way it is.”
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The lines could explode because of mechanical problems exacerbated by Trump’s blockade of Iranian ships in the Strait of Hormuz, according to Trump. The president suggested that if Iran is unable to continue exporting oil, the pipelines will eventually fail. His words come as some experts have warned that by Sunday, Iran could run out of storage space for the oil it is producing and cannot export due to the blockade.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this month that “in a matter of days, Kharg Island storage will be full and the fragile Iranian oil wells will be shut in.” Kharg Island is the distribution point for 90% of Iran’s oil.
“When you have to turn it off because you have no place to store this oil, either put it on ships or storage tanks, which they are just about finished with, a very bad thing is going to happen,” Trump said on Sunday. “When you have lines of vast amounts of oil pouring through your system, if for any reason that line is closed because you can’t continue to put it into containers or ships, which has happened to them, they have no ships because of the blockade.”
$1.5 TRILLION NATIONAL DEFENSE BUDGET DOES NOT INCLUDE IRAN WAR COSTS
Iran essentially closed the Strait of Hormuz, which lies in the Middle East and connects to the Persian Gulf, after the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran on Feb. 28. By controlling access in and out of the strait, Iran was effectively the only country that could export hydrocarbons for several weeks as oil prices spiked roughly 40%, surging toward $120 a barrel.
Trump’s move in April to impose a naval blockade on Iranian ports in the region“neutralized” that strategic advantage, Lucila Bonilla, lead emerging markets economist at Oxford Economics, told CNBC.
