35 Million Barrels Walk Out of the Persian Gulf
Twenty tankers finally exit Hormuz after the deal. Flows are back to 4.8 million barrels a day. The strait reopened, the risk premium never fully will.
Since the US-Iran agreement opened the sea lane, at least 20 stranded tankers carrying roughly 35 million barrels have exited the Strait of Hormuz, and confirmed oil shipments are back up to around 4.8 million barrels per day. That is the good news. The context is that prewar flows ran about 15 million barrels per day, so we are cheering a recovery to less than a third of normal.
The photographs told the story better than the data: beachgoers in the UAE swimming in front of a parking lot of anchored tankers, months of the world's energy sitting at anchor within missile range of the news cycle.
For traders the lesson of the whole episode is about how risk premium actually works. Oil did not spike when the shooting started. It spiked when insurers repriced, when war-risk premiums made transits uneconomical, when the loitering clusters showed up in the AIS data. Watch the shipping data, not the headlines. The tankers know before you do.