Why 21 Miles of Water Prices Your Gas
The Hormuz explainer we wrote before it was cool. A chokepoint primer for degens who just discovered crude futures.
The Strait of Hormuz is 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point, with shipping lanes just two miles wide in each direction. Through this keyhole passes roughly a fifth of global oil supply and a huge share of the world's LNG, most of it bound for Asia.
There is no real bypass. Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline and the UAE's Fujairah line can reroute a few million barrels a day. Everything else has one road home, and that road is within artillery range of a coastline that features regularly in this publication.
What most new traders miss: the binding constraint in a crisis is rarely physical blockage. It is insurance. War-risk premiums can make transits uneconomical without a single shot landing, which means the strait can effectively close while remaining technically open. When this piece was published, that was a theoretical point. File it away, we said. Readers of our 2026 coverage know how the file aged.