Shipping Through Hormuz Grinds to a Halt as Oil Holds Steady
Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has all but stopped. No vessel above 10,000 tonnes has crossed the US-coordinated “southern highway” route with its tracking signal on since Tuesday, maritime intelligence shows, as owners keep tankers away from a waterway that carries a fifth of the world’s oil. Yet crude barely moved: Brent held around $76 a barrel on Friday, little changed on the day. Markets are betting the disruption stays contained, even as analysts call the strait’s paralysis one of the biggest supply shocks on record.
The calm in the oil price is the market’s considered verdict that neither side wants the strait shut for good, because closure would choke Iran’s own exports and invite the overwhelming American response Tehran has so far avoided. What is happening instead is a slow strangulation: a handful of ships still cross “dark”, with transponders off, but the insured, tracked trade that moves the bulk of Gulf crude has effectively frozen, and every day of paralysis tightens the screw on tanker availability and war-risk premiums. Washington insists Iran “does not control” the strait; Tehran says passage will happen only under “Iranian arrangements”. For British households the transmission runs through petrol and gas, where the war premium of recent weeks is now embedded rather than climbing. Watch tanker traffic and tracking data through the strait, the cost of war-risk insurance, and whether a single vessel struck in error tips the market out of its wager that this stays contained.