Iran's Caspian Pivot: Can Northern Ports Keep Goods Moving as Hormuz Stays Blocked?

TEHRAN, Iran – With United States naval forces blocking Iran's southern ports and air strikes having damaged infrastructure there, Tehran is scrambling for alternative ways to move oil out of the country and bring essential goods in. The Caspian Sea, stretching along Iran's northern coast, is emerging as the most plausible alternative gateway to the outside world — though planners face shallowing waters, overstretched rail networks and congested land borders.

The diplomatic backdrop remains bleak. Recent United Nations efforts to break the deadlock between Tehran and Washington have collapsed, after US President Donald Trump dismissed an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz as unacceptable. With no sign of an end to the war that the United States and Israel began against Iran on February 28, the government in Tehran is restructuring the direction of its trade in real time.

The Caspian is the world's largest landlocked body of water, divided among five littoral states: Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. It offers Iran something no other option currently does — a maritime outlet that sits outside the reach of the blockade in the Gulf. Iran already has three established Caspian ports, at Anzali, Amirabad and Nowshahr, and an existing freight rail corridor running east toward Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and China.

The obstacle is the sea itself. Shipping across the Caspian has been steadily disrupted by a long decline in water levels, a trend that is projected to continue for decades. Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said Caspian water levels have already fallen by roughly 2 metres (6.6 feet) since the 1990s, and could recede by a further 8 to 21 metres (26 to 69 feet) before the end of the century.

Iranian officials describe an even more immediate picture. Shahram Fadakar, director general of the Iranian Department of Environment's Office for Coastal and Marine Ecosystem Protection, said levels have been dropping by more than 20 centimetres a year over the past two to three years. He warned that the trend threatens commerce among all five Caspian countries, not only Iran.

The practical effect on shipping is already measurable. Masoud Polmeh, secretary-general of the Shipping Association of Iran, said northern ports that once accommodated vessels weighing up to 6,000 tonnes can now take only 4,000-tonne ships. He also reported that Iranian vessels reaching the Caspian by way of Russia's Volga River have become immobilised by low water, sometimes sitting motionless for days or weeks until crews are rescued. Polmeh added that, so far, that fate has not befallen ships in Iranian ports themselves.

Attention is therefore turning to land routes as well. Even without any military action in the north, the sheer redirection of freight has placed enormous pressure on Iran's borders with its neighbours. Vali Kaleji, an independent writer and researcher specialising in Iran and Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus, said at the Norduz crossing with Armenia as many as 1,800 trucks have been waiting for days at a time to enter Iran. At other terminals, holds of 10 to 15 days are reported.

Kaleji cautioned that road congestion cannot be blamed entirely on the rerouting of maritime cargo. Limited terminal capacity, complex customs procedures, weak road infrastructure and long-running construction projects have all added to the delays. Sanctions imposed on Iranian airlines, which have pushed large numbers of travellers toward the land border terminals with Armenia and Turkey, have compounded the pressure, he said.

Rail remains the deeper weakness in Iran's northern network. The eastern Caspian corridor links Iran by rail to Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and China, but the country's freight links with the South Caucasus — cut during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War from 1988 to 1994 — are still closed. Reviving the Soviet-era Julfa-Nakhchivan line, Kaleji said, depends on the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process and specifically on the implementation of the TRIPP project, a US-backed transit corridor. Because a large share of western-route traffic on the North-South Transport Corridor runs through that line, he called the missing connection a principal obstacle to boosting trade volumes under conditions of intensified naval blockade in the south.

Official figures suggest the shift is real, even if poorly documented. Mohammad Shakibi-Nasab, chief of the Ports and Maritime Organization, said Iran's total nominal port capacity stands at 300 million tonnes, of which only 30 million tonnes is linked to northern facilities. Yet the northern ports' share of essential goods transport has climbed from 18 percent before the US-Israeli war to 30 percent today. He also stressed the scale gap: a single vessel at a southern port can carry as much cargo as 20 ships moving through the Caspian.

More detailed signs of change came from Hadi Haghshenas, governor of the northern province of Gilan, who said in early September that container arrivals at Caspian ports rose 50 percent year-on-year during the five Iranian calendar months ending on August 22. He noted that, unlike the Port of Shahid Rajaei in the south, the northern ports sit closer to major cities in central Iran — Tehran, Isfahan and Arak — potentially trimming the overland cost of delivering imports to end users.

Haghshenas also pointed to the so-called China-Aktau-northern Iran route, which carries cargo by rail across Kazakhstan to Aktau, then by ship to Caspian ports and onward by road into Iran, as a way to expand regional trade. Tehran is additionally trying to complete the missing sections of its northern rail network, an unfinished project that would determine how much of the diverted cargo volume can move by rail rather than by congested road.

Analysts caution that hard data on the northward shift remains thin. Iranian authorities have not specified which commodities, or in what quantities, have been rerouted to Anzali, Amirabad and Nowshahr, and the southern ports' share of oil exports — the central purpose of the whole exercise — remains unquantified. What is clear is that the blockade has already pushed a fifth of the country's essential imports north, while the water beneath those ports keeps sinking.