Secret stockpile may help

Press, 29 February 1984, Page 10

Secret stockpile may help

By

Jeffrey Segal

of Reuters (through NZPA) London If the worst came to the worst and oil supplies through the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Gulf were blocked, a secret Saudi Arabian stockpile could keep the West going through the first couple of weeks of a new oil supply crisis. Oil industry analysts in London and New York say

Saudi Arabia now has a floating oil stockpile big enough to make up for a stoppage of Hormuz traffic for 10 days. The Saudi planning indicates that they, like big consumer nations, have thought it prudent to prepare for any eventuality while the Iran-Iraq war escalates. Iran has frequently threatened to block the strait if Iraq disrupted

Iranian oil movements, but President Hojatoleslam Ali Khamenei has said Teheran would not do so unless Iran was denied the right of traffic. Military sources in London and in the Gulf doubt whether Iran in fact has the means to enforce a closure of Hormuz, but they say an all-out blockade might not be necessary to choke off oil shipments. An attack on an oil

tanker by a few desperate men of either combatant side could have much the same effect by deterring ships. President Ronald Reagan has said the United States is determined to keep open the 40km wide strait which carries about 7.5 to 8 million barrels of crude oil and refined oil products every day, about one-sixth of the non-Communist world’s needs.

Fighting in the Iran-Iraq war, now in its forty-first month, has reached a new intensity in the last week. But until its claim this week that it had attacked Iranian oil tankers at Kharg, Iraq had made no move to disrupt Iran’s oil shipments. The fear is that Iran might retaliate against Gulf shipping for any such Iraqi attack.