The energy wars hit the high seas
Tim McDonnell
Thu, December 11, 2025 at 8:05 AM EST
2 min read
The high seas are increasingly dangerous territory for autocratic petrostates. On Wednesday, US military and law enforcement agents seized an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast. The ship had reportedly spent at least the past two years ferrying sanctioned crude from Iran and Venezuela, and using transponder tricks to obscure its location.
Nabbing the ship marks a drastic escalation in US President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, one that will be especially painful for Maduro’s deeply oil-reliant budget and that is probably on firmer legal footing than the recent spate of missile strikes on purported drug boats (and that could sting China, the main buyer of Venezuelan oil). The fate of the oil itself is less clear: “We keep it, I guess,” Trump said, which the Venezuelan government called “blatant theft.”
The bigger picture is that seaborne oil trade is quickly turning into the most exposed Achilles’ heel at the center of major global conflicts. The European Union and G7 are considering aggressive new financial measures against Russia’s “shadow fleet,” which now handles two-thirds of the country’s oil exports. Ukraine is acting more decisively on its own, with a recent string of naval drone attacks that hit five Russian oil vessels in far-flung corners of the globe over 13 days.
In the past, when Western governments sanctioned an adversary’s oil exports, they were loath to take “kinetic” action against sanction-dodging ships. Shadow vessels could be hard to track; interceptions risk oil spills or violations of international law; and political leaders are always fearful that attempts to squeeze an adversary’s oil revenue can backfire by raising energy prices at home.
But now, satellite imagery and other open-source data have made it much harder to hide on the high seas. And oil prices are relatively low amidst an oversupplied global market, reducing the risk of significant price blowback. In fact, that market glut is most visible at sea: The total number of barrels currently on ships is 24% higher than the average of the last decade, and the number of sanctioned barrels has leapt 82% in the past year. The seas are awash, in other words, in juicy oil targets.
Would Russia or Venezuela risk a direct engagement with the US Navy in defense of commercial oil vessels? The Pentagon seems to find that unlikely. Still, there’s a lesson here about the security risks faced by both buyers and sellers of seaborne fossil fuels — one that applies to the US as much as its adversaries.
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