The interesting question about the Strait of Hormuz in 2026 is not whether it is closed. On paper it never quite was. The question is how many ships still use it, and the answer keeps shrinking: from roughly 125 vessels a day before the war, with other counts ranging between 60 and 140, to near zero by July, under 2% of normal tonnage. What researchers found when they combined AIS tracking data with satellite imagery was a “roughly 97% drop in maritime traffic” during a past period of disruption, and the same measurement problem keeps recurring, because ships that switch off their transponders simply disappear from the commercial map while the waterway itself stays open.
The mechanism of the vulnerability is geographic. Other chokepoints have workarounds: when the Suez Canal blocked in 2021, cargo went around the Cape of Good Hope instead; when the Bab-el-Mandeb turned dangerous under the Houthi missile campaign, tankers took longer passages. Hormuz is different for one structural reason, what an energy analysis calls “the complete absence of any large-scale bypass capable of absorbing its full commercial throughput”. Its verdict is blunter: “A full closure does not redirect trade. It eliminates it.” Under normal conditions the strait carried about 20% of global oil consumption and roughly 25% of seaborne oil trade, by U.S. Energy Information Administration analysis, serving exports from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Iraq.
The timeline explains why confidence kept breaking. After U.S. and Israeli operations targeting Iran in late February 2026, the Revolutionary Guard declared passage no longer permitted, and effective commercial closure set in on February 28, and more than 150 vessels were trapped inside the Gulf. A brief reopening on April 21 lasted 24 hours before renewed hostilities shut it again. “The June 17 U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding created genuine market optimism”, and ballast LNG carriers piled into the Gulf expecting stronger exports; Qatar’s Al Rekayyat carrier was hit on July 7, and July 14 brought strikes on two UAE-linked VLCCs, ending that window. The July 7 attack mattered technically, too: the targeted vessel had disabled its AIS transponder, a step assumed to reduce targeting risk, so the lesson now is that “AIS transponder status no longer provides meaningful protection”.
What still moves follows a priority logic. About one-third of transits in partial windows were crude on VLCC, Suezmax and Aframax tonnage; product tankers ran four to six a day, bulk carriers three to seven, container ships three to five, LPG carriers about one. Peak days saw nine to ten VLCCs running a shuttle circuit: out laden, ship-to-ship transfer in safer water, back for more cargo. Intriguingly, the operators are almost exclusively state-linked, since private owners decline the risk, a split with consequences for insurance and freight benchmarks.
Downstream, the science behind the damage is a feedstock problem. Asian petrochemical crackers run on Gulf LPG and naphtha, five to ten LPG carriers a day in normal times; in recent windows most days saw zero departures. Analysts at Energy Aspects describe flows so erratic that scheduling becomes “extremely difficult for Asian cracker operators to schedule production”, with alternative supplies from the United States requiring longer shipping at higher freight cost.
The end state is the paradox the data now show. Iran’s Gulf authority has published a list of 77 ships accused of violating transit protocols, threatening fines, detention or confiscation, and telling insurers and classification societies to stop serving them. The IMF warns of higher freight and insurance costs and draining oil inventories; Saudi and Emirati pipelines cannot absorb the sea volumes, and risk simply shifts to the Bab-el-Mandab or the Cape. The result, as one Gulf analysis puts it, is that “a waterway may remain geographically open, yet its commercial utility diminishes”, with rising risk and cost producing “an effect akin to an economic shutdown, even while the waterway remains open”. A strait does not need to close to disappear.
Sources
- Strait of Hormuz Shipping Traffic Crisis 2026
- Strait of Hormuz: Decline in shipping traffic threatens oil and global trade.
