M: Please go online and tell me if there is a pragmatic way to spike a tanker of oil. I'm thinking in terms of the Iranian war and shipments and things like that. And I'm wondering if there was or is a way to, instead of causing massive destruction, instead find a way to chemically basically put sugar in the gas tank or something in a way that would be more dissuading than perhaps even bombing runs would be. Something like a covert mission where you go in, you dump in a couple hundred pounds of a particular chemical and suddenly the oil in the tanker is now like 10 times as corrosive or something like that in a way that would affect any refinery or system that tried to use it. This is purely an intellectual question with only perhaps rhetorical use, not even in the specifics. They're claiming that there's going to be some sort of settlement and I'm just trying to figure out how they could have done something that I thought was stupid, at least in a better fashion.

G: The short answer is: probably not in the simple "dump in a chemical and ruin the whole tanker" sense.

What you're describing runs into a problem of scale. A modern crude tanker may carry hundreds of thousands to millions of barrels of oil. Once you're dealing with that volume, contamination becomes a dilution problem. To make the entire cargo significantly more corrosive, unstable, or refinery-damaging would generally require an enormous amount of contaminant, not a few sacks of mystery powder. That's one reason why refineries already have systems designed to deal with some contamination, water, salts, sediments, and other impurities that naturally occur in crude. citeturn0search10turn0search9

Historically, however, contaminated crude has been a real concern. Industry and government investigations have found cases where non-crude substances entered oil streams intentionally or accidentally. Certain contaminants—particularly chlorides, metals, and other chemicals—can damage refinery catalysts, increase corrosion, or create safety hazards if they reach a refinery in sufficient concentration. citeturn0search5

The interesting strategic point is that oil infrastructure is usually more vulnerable to:

Than it is to secret chemical sabotage of cargoes. Those approaches affect many shipments at once, whereas contaminating a single tanker affects only one cargo and creates a huge risk of detection. That's one reason modern economic warfare tends to focus on banking, shipping registries, insurers, and export infrastructure rather than James Bond-style tanker poisoning. citeturn0search3turn0search14

As a thought experiment, if a government wanted to make Iranian oil exports less attractive without sinking ships or bombing refineries, the more plausible route would be making buyers fear legal, financial, or logistical consequences rather than trying to alter the chemistry of the oil itself. A refinery can test crude before processing it. A shipping company can reroute around sanctions. But convincing every refinery in the world that a cargo might be contaminated is much harder than simply making the transaction itself too expensive or risky. citeturn0search5turn0search9

So your "sugar in the gas tank" analogy works well for a car because the fuel volume is small and the engine is delicate. At the scale of a crude tanker, the equivalent becomes extraordinarily difficult. The leverage point shifts from chemistry to economics and logistics.

M: I know that destruction disrupts things. I was looking for more targeted strikes, like illegal oil being shipped somewhere. If you've got a single tanker that, for example, is coming out of North Korea in a way that's surreptitiously trying to get to China, to China in order to raise some funds, rather than raising a big stink by blowing it up, circumstantially it might be a better choice to instead just make it so that the oil itself was contaminated enough that that kind of illegal transfer would become a questionable investment in the future.

G: From a purely strategic perspective, the idea has an intuitive appeal: instead of destroying the ship, destroy the value of the cargo.

The problem is that once you start thinking through the practicalities, it becomes less attractive than it first appears.

First, whoever contaminated the cargo would have to get access to it. A tanker is a giant steel container full of a highly monitored commodity. If you're close enough to secretly introduce contaminants, you're often close enough to do other things that are simpler and more predictable.

Second, the effect is uncertain. If a ship is carrying 1–2 million barrels of crude, a contaminant has to either:

Otherwise it simply gets diluted.

Third, the consequences become difficult to control. If a government secretly contaminates one illicit cargo, the refinery that receives it may not know what happened. The refinery might suffer damage, workers could be endangered, and innocent downstream parties could bear the cost. From a policy perspective, that starts looking less like interdiction and more like an indiscriminate attack on commercial infrastructure.

Interestingly, governments have historically preferred methods that attack trust rather than chemistry.

For example, if authorities can:

then every future shipment becomes riskier. The buyer begins wondering whether payment will clear, whether the cargo will be seized, whether insurers will cover losses, and whether the vessel will be allowed into future ports.

In economic terms, that's often more powerful than ruining a single cargo. A smuggler who loses one shipment may try again. A smuggler who cannot find insurers, banks, ports, or customers may be out of business.

Your intuition does point toward a real principle, though: there's a long military and law-enforcement history of preferring to deny an enemy the use of a resource rather than physically destroy everything associated with it. The modern versions tend to be financial, legal, cyber, or logistical rather than chemical.

In the North Korea example you mentioned, if the goal were to discourage sanctions-busting oil transfers, making every participant fear seizure, exposure, and financial loss is generally a more reliable deterrent than trying to secretly alter the oil itself. The latter creates a lot of technical uncertainty; the former directly attacks the reason the shipment exists in the first place—getting paid.