The trading arm of Vietnam's state oil company has urged the US Navy to allow a crude oil tanker laden with Iraqi oil to sail through its blockade in the Middle East gulf and provide a Vietnamese refinery with critical supplies, PV OIL said in a letter on Tuesday.
The US military has expanded its shipping blockade on Iran to include cargoes deemed contraband, although it has said other oil exports from the Persian Gulf are free to sail through.
The Maltese-flagged Agio Fanourios I supertanker, carrying two million barrels of crude oil, sailed out of the Strait of Hormuz on May 10 and was sailing in the Gulf of Oman before making a U-turn on May 11, ship tracking data on the MarineTraffic platform showed on Tuesday.
It was not clear whether the vessel had been stopped by the US Navy and detained.
The US-Israeli war on Iran has prompted the closure of the Strait of Hormuz with hundreds of ships stranded and global energy supplies disrupted from the critical waterway through which 20 per cent of the world's energy supplies pass.
"This cargo is of extreme importance to Nghi Son Refinery (NSRP), to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and to the Vietnamese people," Petrovietnam Oil Corporation (PV OIL) Vice President Hoang Dinh Tung said in a May 12 letter seen by Reuters and sent to US military and diplomatic missions.
"NSRP's feedstock inventories are critically low; any further delay risks halting refinery throughput, with cascading consequences for millions of Vietnamese consumers, businesses, public services and industries."
PVOIL said it "unequivocally" confirmed that the vessel loaded Iraqi Basra crude oil sold by the Iraqi oil company SOMO after the tanker was loaded between April 10 to 14 with oil.
US officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting by Florence Tan and Jonathan Saul, additional reporting by Timothy Gardner and Idrees Ali; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
