Making Sense of the Straight of Hormuz Traffic to Date
Thu 8:38 am +00:00, 25 Jun 2026
Source: https://www.winterwatch.net/2026/06/making-sense-of-the-soh-traffic-to-date/
This is being hailed as a big victory. First looking at the feeble outgoing it is mostly Iranian heading for China with little relief elsewhere. Notice that yesterday only 12 vessels left the region and only 8 the previous day. These are commercial vessels and not all are crude tankers.
It is easy to see that the Trump administration is lying about oil leaving the PG.
There is some excitement around westbound entering the Persian Gulf which surged to 32 yesterday and 20 on June 23.
Assuming these are large tankers entering the Gulf per Chat GPT it takes 5-10 days to load in Basra or Kuwait under normal conditions and up 18 days in congestion conditions. Adding to the delay Basra declared force majeure. Shows low confidence that tankers will arrive anytime soon. Tanker rates when available have doubled. Story translates when clicked.
Once laden it takes another ten days for PG oil to reach South Asia. 3 to 4 weeks to get to Western Europe and 5 to 6 weeks to arrive in Gulf Coast.
What oil that moves will be an Iranian-Chinese windfall. There are 72 million barrels of Iranian oil in the PG, and 93 million of non-Iranian oil. If the small number of tankers westbound are able to load and exit the PG that would make a small dent. There are currently about 80 VLCC supertankers (carry 2 million barrels) in or near the Gulf of Oman and Indian Ocean. In a perfect world they could pick up all trapped oil in the PG region. Counting from July 1 it would take a month and a half to get this to Europe.
The question is how much PG oil ends up in China instead. Japan? Korea? Is this low import level sustainable?
Strategic petroleum releases net US end in June. US has 40 million more in July. With Cushing bottoming it is unlikely the US will continuing large scale exporting.
A consideration in the read em and weep juggling scarce oil available are hurricanes. August-September storms surge. This season’s forecast for GOM is for 13 named storms, 6 hurricanes and 2 major hurricane.
