Vadinar

Under the lapse of General License U on 19 April 2026, Vadinar became the first Indian port to face secondary-sanctions exposure on Iranian crude deliveries since March 2026. The PING SHUN, originally bound for Vadinar with 600,000 barrels of Iranian crude, was diverted mid-transit to Dongying, China, as Reliance Industries withdrew before the cliff. This is the first concrete instance of a Vadinar-destination cargo being rerouted under GL-U's exit.

Vadinar sits on India's western Gujarat coast at approximately 22.4N, 69.7E. It hosts Reliance Industries' Jamnagar refinery complex, the world's largest single-location refinery at 1.4 million Barrels Per Day. The port operates Single Point Mooring (SPM) terminals capable of receiving VLCC and Aframax-class vessels. Reliance maintained rupee-based settlement mechanisms from pre-2019 Iranian crude trade, which allowed it to execute the original March delivery when no other Indian refiner could.

Vadinar's significance in the Hormuz crisis is as the only Indian port with both the refinery scale and the pre-existing settlement infrastructure to process sanctioned Iranian crude. Its withdrawal from the market under GL-U's lapse removes the sole functioning non-Chinese buyer. With 128 million barrels in floating storage across the wider sanctioned fleet, the closure of the Vadinar route consolidates Iranian crude exports toward China's Shandong independent refiners and away from price-sensitive South Asian buyers, compressing the market further.