Zero Transits: The Strait Is Effectively Closed
From 138 vessels a day to almost none. One fifth of the world's oil and LNG is on pause, and the loitering clusters on the AIS map keep growing.
The numbers from the shipping trackers are stark. Before hostilities, about 138 vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz daily. Since May 6, open transits have fallen to near zero. Marine traffic data shows growing clusters of loitering vessels on both sides of the strait, ships waiting for insurance, for escorts, for someone to blink.
Roughly one fifth of the world's oil and LNG moves through this 21-mile-wide chokepoint, or did. There is no pipeline network on earth that replaces it. Saudi and Emirati bypass lines can carry a fraction of the flow. The rest simply waits.
What is remarkable is how orderly the disaster is. No dramatic sinkings dominating the tape, just an insurance market quietly refusing to underwrite passage and a global energy system discovering how much of its stability was actually underwriting capacity. Every energy trader alive is now an amateur marine insurance analyst. Welcome to the desk. The coffee is bad.