Ever since the UK, US and other P5+1 nations signed the historic nuclear deal with Iran on 14 July, world markets have been anticipating what will happen when sanctions are finally lifted on the country.
Among the biggest questions: what will happen to the oil price? Iran is one of the world's biggest oil producing countries, holding 10.5 percent of all proven oil reserves, according to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. When the sanctions are lifted, it's likely to drive supply up and prices down -- but quite how much will depend on what the country has stored on supertankers floating in the Persian gulf. "Right now, everybody is talking about this," says Ami Daniel, cofounder of Israeli maritime data startup Windward. "The problem is Iran does a lot of data manipulation, so nobody really knows how much oil there is in the gulf."
Officially, Iran claims it doesn't stockpile oil in the Gulf, but international estimates vary from around ten million to 40 million barrels. Windward thinks that number is low: it says the country currently has 53 million barrels stored in ships along the Iranian coast, waiting for the sanctions to lift. The Tel Aviv-based startup has launched a new online tool, which it calls Foresea, for analysts to track oil in the gulf in real time.
It's a bold claim, but Windward -- which recently spoke at WIRED Money -- says it has the data.
Founded in 2010 by two former naval officers, the company set out to solve a simple problem: while 90 percent of the world's trade happens by sea, global maritime data is disjointed, analogue and often inaccurate, due to false reporting and intentional manipulation. Daniel's system, which he calls the Windward Mind, creates a real-time database of every ship at sea worldwide by combining data from numerous sources with other inputs, such as satellite imagery. "We take a few different data sources: that can be shipment data, cargo data, movement data," says Daniel. "We're collating more than 100 million data points per day." The company's software is already used by security agencies, including navies, coast guards, and customs, to monitor things like illegal fishing and piracy.
In the case of Iran, Daniel explains, the 53 million estimate came from analysing each craft currently in the Gulf, in real-time. "If you calculate average loading speeds at jetties, the technical specification of the ships, you put all these facts together, you can calculate how much is on each ship," he says. "By the way: Iranian oil doesn't mean Iranian ships. Because they want to manipulate the data, there are all kind of different vessels worldwide from all different flags."
Of course, it's impossible to fact-check Windward's estimates -- while Iran's self-reporting is widely discredited, the company doesn't release its analysis either.
Maritime data isn't just useful when it comes to Iranian oil. One of the outcomes of Windward's data, Daniel explains, is the ability to use it to monitor and even predict market movements -- particularly when information is being self-reported, in the case of countries like China. "There have been cases of looking at satellite images of houses being constructed as an indicator for growth in China," he says. "We feel that's a bit too late: once a building has been built, it's already been booked two or three years before that. But if you look at raw materials imports that are used to make steel, you can look at consumption. So what we try to do is go down the value chain, look at raw data for imports, and try and use that as predictive indicators for growth."
Creating such a database, Daniel says, could be instrumental not just for investors and governments, but for anyone who cares about what's happening at sea. "Gas, coal, iron ore, grain, soya beans -- all of these are transported by sea, and that's even before consumer goods," he says. "Despite the huge stakes, ship activity remains a mystery. The oceans are the last analogue market and the world's missing data link."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
