The Strait of Hormuz is open, at about a quarter of normal

The headline question about the Strait of Hormuz has been asked in binary terms since February: is it open or closed? The answer, seven months in, is neither. It is open and running at roughly a quarter of its normal throughput for refined products, which is a condition the pre-war debate did not really anticipate.

Bloomberg reported on 10 September that at least a million barrels a day of oil products were moving through the waterway, against about four million before the war, excluding liquefied petroleum gas.¹ Flows are recovering, slowly, and not fast enough to bring fuel prices down.

Brent traded near $108 a barrel on 10 September, as Iranian attacks on shipping and a Houthi advance in Yemen drove a second consecutive day of steep increases.³ By 17 September, after Saudi Arabia arranged additional shipments through Oman’s Sohar port using ship-to-ship transfers, the November Brent contract had fallen 1.5 per cent to $104.28, with US West Texas Intermediate down 1.1 per cent at $101.30.² The day before, Saudi rerouting had already knocked 2.7 per cent off the Brent price.⁴

Earlier in the month, prices had climbed as strikes in the strait intensified.⁶ The pattern through September has been consistent: attacks push the price up, workarounds pull it back down, and the floor keeps rising.

Attacks on commercial vessels are the mechanism by which Iran has degraded the strait without closing it. Iranian attacks on shipping are what broke the July ceasefire.⁷ As of 15 September, 103 commercial vessels had been redirected cumulatively, with US Central Command maintaining blockade operations.⁴ On 16 September, a US-contracted vessel was struck near the strait, with the crew reported to have suffered minor injuries including smoke inhalation.⁴ Two ships were reported attacked in the strait this week.⁵

Saudi Arabia has shut a key pipeline after multiple attacks and is moving crude around the chokepoint entirely.⁴ The United States has kept a security alert in place for the region, warning of the potential for unforeseen escalation.⁸ UN Secretary-General António Guterres repeated calls on 16 September for de-escalation and the restoration of freedom of navigation.²

The strait is not the only pressure point. The Houthis seized a critical Yemeni port around 10 September,³ opening a crisis at the Bab el-Mandeb at the same time as the Hormuz disruption, which squeezes both ends of the Red Sea corridor at once.

The humanitarian consequences are already large: UN agencies reported 112,000 people displaced within Yemen in two weeks and nearly 3,000 crossing to Djibouti in under a week. Saudi Arabia and the Houthis have been trading strikes, with one Yemeni killed by intercepted drone debris in Taif.⁹

There is one notable piece of diplomacy underneath this. Reuters reported that China privately asked Iran to restrain the Houthis during Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s visit.⁹ China is the principal buyer of Iranian crude, and a Chinese request of that kind is the closest thing to leverage anyone has demonstrated in this theatre.

We have not been able to source current war-risk insurance premiums for Gulf transits, which would be the cleanest single measure of how dangerous underwriters actually think the passage is. We also have no verified current figure for Iranian crude exports or their destination. Both are gaps, and we would rather say so than reach for an estimate.

The background arithmetic has not changed: Hormuz remains the single most consequential chokepoint in the oil trade, and the reason a regional war registers on fuel prices worldwide.¹⁰ What has changed is that the market has spent seven months learning to price a strait that is neither open nor shut.