On April 3rd, in a patch of open water roughly 43 miles off the coast of peninsular Malaysia — half the size of Rhode Island, unnamed on most charts — two tankers came alongside each other and exchanged 2 million barrels of crude oil. The vessel passing the cargo: the Herby, Iranian-flagged, registered to the state-owned National Iranian Oil Company. The vessel receiving it: the Hauncayo, transponder dark, origin unlisted, destination logged as a third-country export. Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite imagery captured the transfer. Three days later, MarineTraffic showed the Hauncayo loitering at a pier in Yantai Port, Shandong Province, China. Then it went dark again for three days — the window consistent with offloading to a port terminal — before reappearing at the same berth, empty.

That single transfer was not an anomaly. It was a scheduled stop on a well-worn route, and the water where it happened has a name in the trade: the Eastern Outer Port Limits anchorage, or EOPL — the eastern mouth of the Singapore Strait, just outside Malaysian jurisdiction, technically international water, functionally Iran's offshore gas station. Kpler vessel data shows that in April alone, at least seven separate vessels loaded Iranian crude at the EOPL and ran it north to ports in Shandong. United Against Nuclear Iran tracked at least 250 ship-to-ship transfers inside that same anchorage between January 1 and April 21 of this year. The tankers involved run with their Automatic Identification System transponders off. The oil they carry arrives in China labeled as Malaysian blend.

Waiting for that cargo at the end of the line, across the Yellow Sea, are the facilities Washington has spent two years trying to strangle: the teapot refineries of Shandong Province — small, independent oil processors that operate with Beijing's permission and that, according to Vortexa analytics data covering March and April, have received an average of 1.5 million barrels per day of Iranian crude at four Yellow Sea ports plus Dalian. That figure — sustained through a war, a naval blockade, and five successive rounds of U.S. Treasury sanctions — has not materially declined. Analysts say the modest dip since the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports on April 13th is a price effect, not a supply effect. Tens of millions of barrels remain in floating storage on tankers parked well east of Hormuz, waiting for the discount to widen enough to move.

Trump lands in Beijing on Wednesday. The teapot refineries will still be running on Thursday.

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The routing has two legs, and both are designed to outlast the sanctions regime trying to stop them. On the first leg, Iranian crude — loaded primarily at Kharg Island — moves by VLCC across the Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca, and into the EOPL anchorage, where the tankers go dark and the transfers happen in the open, visible to anyone with a satellite and invisible to every compliance desk on the planet. On the second leg, a clean vessel — flagged in a third country, carrying forged documentation listing the cargo as "Malaysian blend" or "Indonesian origin" — runs the last 2,000 miles to Shandong. The gap between the two legs is where the paper trail ends. Beijing then receives the crude and claims, with a straight face, that it does not import Iranian oil.

On April 24th, the U.S. Treasury designated Hengli Petrochemical's Dalian refinery as one of Tehran's most valued customers — generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the Iranian military through crude purchases — and simultaneously sanctioned roughly 40 additional shipping firms and vessels operating as part of the shadow fleet. One week later, Beijing's Ministry of Commerce issued a blocking injunction ordering Chinese firms to disregard those sanctions. Not to comply quietly. To officially, legally, ignore them. The injunction covered Hengli and four other teapot refineries: Shandong Jincheng Petrochemical Group, Hebei Xinhai Chemical Group, Shouguang Luqing Petrochemical, and Shandong Shengxing Chemical. China's embassy in Washington called the sanctions "political weaponization of trade."

Washington then sanctioned 12 more entities the day before Trump's departure for Beijing.

The Treasury's own advisory note, released late last month, warned financial institutions that Iranian oil is being blended with third-country crude to disguise its origin — and that front companies linked to Sepehr Energy Jahan Nama Pars Company, an Iranian military-affiliated entity, have been coordinating vessel berthing, discharge operations, and onshore storage through Hong Kong-based intermediaries. The OFAC advisory noted that Iranian front companies have been using those intermediaries' bank accounts to receive payment and access foreign currency — SWIFT-compliant wires, clearing through correspondent banks that have no idea what the underlying cargo was. Standard trade finance. Ordinary on paper.

Washington is cutting off Iran's cash. Beijing is keeping the register open. They meet Thursday in the Forbidden City to discuss a trade deal.

The AAA national average for a gallon of regular gasoline stood at $4.52 as of May 11th — up $1.40 from a year ago, up 50% from the day before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran on February 28th, and still climbing. The week ending May 7th saw the largest single-week jump in pump prices since 2022, a 25-cent increase for the second consecutive week. In California the average has eclipsed $6. In six states — Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington — prices are at or above $5. The EIA's last weekly retail average, released May 5th, clocked at $4.45 per gallon. The next release is due today.

Jet fuel has surged 95% since the war began, forcing airlines to add surcharges and driving Spirit Airlines into shutdown. The USPS, Amazon, and FedEx have all imposed fuel surcharges on shipping. The Iran war fuel crisis has wiped out European gas storage buffers — the continent entered winter at 30% capacity — and the International Energy Agency has formally characterized the Hormuz closure as the largest supply disruption in the history of global oil markets. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas modeled the Q2 impact at an annualized GDP hit of 2.9 percentage points, with WTI pushed to $98 per barrel under the most conservative scenario. Brent has already traded above $100 for six weeks.

Meanwhile, the oil keeping Iran's regime solvent — moving through the EOPL, relabeled as Malaysian blend, discharged in Yantai in the dark — is trading at a $10 discount to that same benchmark. Tehran collects the revenue. The teapot refineries clip the spread. Beijing tells its firms to ignore the sanctions. And the ceasefire Trump is carrying to Beijing is, by his own words as of Monday, "on life support."