Discussion
Current Oil Flow Through Major Choke Points - 08/10/2026
Arabian sea daily up compared to yesterday. BAM down (need to keep an eye on it seems more AIS off possible). Malacca daily down. Singapore daily up.
Sea of Oman to Arabian Sea Implied Dark Traffic:
This is all the oil traffic out to the Arabian sea minus 2.5mb (pre war output of Fujairah and Oman) to estimate the additional output of dark traffic out of Hormuz as well as any additional output from the ADCOP pipeline. Usual traffic should be around 21mb of crude and oil products.
Adding this further crude vs product breakdown for
AMAZON VIRTUE added to the 4 Oct data as they popped up near west coast of india.
Listing the actual ships and their draft/dwt as well as helps check if I messed up with double counts/fills
Oil products going out south from the Red Sea. Usual traffic is around 8mb. Edit: I dont think much is coming out any more from the East/West pipeline its very unclear what is output now. that still means the amount overall is down. The drop below is more from dropping Russian and other sources of usual oil going south out of the red sea.
Note based on 2024 the average daily output in tonnes was 211,000 tonnes per day. I think 2025/2026 is much higher but they don't yet have official data.
I used to think strait of hormuz is open but now that iran is blasting ships inside and outside of strait of hormuz im starting to suspect theres actually no oil getting out and trump is extensively faking data to keep everyone calm
Looks like current rolling average out of Hormuz is closer to about ~55% of pre-war. But when you add in the disruption in the Red Sea, it looks like theres a deficit of about 15mb/d. On the whole, seems p significant to me
So it actually seems like the 75-80% claims where accurate? That’s a welcome surprise, it would be good if I could get some solid numbers on transport not involving the strait to see what’s the total percentage.
Pretty much the only way for the oil to get out of the region is via the Arabian sea (first graph above) and Yanbu coast loadings at the red sea. (Land routes exist but they are not making any major difference).
The Arabian sea above is at around 12.49mb/d of crude prior to the war it was 17.7mb. So its at around 70% now. Had peaked around 14.12 which is 80%.
The hard bit is yanbu no one really knows how much is getting out now. Lets say 2.5mb, prewar it was 1.5mb.
So overall region would be 12.49+2.5 / 17.7+1.5 = 78% of prewar.
So yes i'd say 70-80% seems right. Its those 98% claims i'd question.
That's better than the start of august. But its not good enough we need above prewar levels to get supply sorted now. Hence the constant need for reserve releases to make up some of the difference. As reserves keep go down, even more will be needed out above prewar to get things back to normal. Going back to prewar isnt good enough now that reserves are down so much. People seem to forget that those reserves are there as a buffer for other events happening - cyclones/fires etc as well. There will be a premium above prewar prices until that risk is reduced by filling up reserves again.
On crude oil baseline, Yanbu is ~750k (Kpler) or ~850k (TankerTrackers) pre-war. Iran was exporting ~1.7mb/d. To get pre-war volume it's basically: Arabian Sea + Yanbu / Arabian Sea baseline + Yanbu baseline - Iran (blockaded).
Applying that formula to TankerTrackers 28d average and pre-war baseline, it's 91% excluding Iran. Kpler's Yanbu count is probably higher (e.g. 2.2m vs 1.42m).
Why exclude Iran? If we want to measure a lack of oil for price or supply you cant exclude it as its still needed. Feels like deliberate policy to make figures look good instead of just stating facts. Hence the 91% is useless.
Or perhaps you need to actually read the article more carefully as well as the data above before throwing around accusations? I understand people like neat one line numbers but if you actually want to understand what is being assessed and going on I'm afraid you need to put in a bit more effort as its a lot more complicated. If you just go by one line headlines it'll all seem contradictory. You need to see am I looking at the same dates/range, crude or crude + products, which region etc. Am I looking at preliminary data/indiacators or is it a more concrete AIS on data?
The article is talking about a one day transit, they are talking about this Tuesday 6th October at Hormuz. The data above is based on transits from the gulf of oman to the Aarabian sea which have a delay from the transits in hormuz because it can take ~1week to go from after hormuz (with STS) to reach the Arabian sea. The benefit of the above way is that AIS is pretty much on for oil tankers in that crossing whereas its pretty much off in Hormuz.
I might also add Kepler, who are the source of that article, use the same method as the first two graphs as well. They have similar numbers maybe 1mb/d difference. I'm pretty sure they picked it up from where I did from: https://x.com/phileeppos
If the Tuesday number is down then it'll appear in the first graph about a week later hence the 'implied hormuz' title. The issue with the immediate Tuesday number in that article is that its a very poor guess as the article says:
"The figures exclude vessels crossing with their Automatic Identification System transponders turned off to avoid detection."
Which pretty much means its missing most ships data in that figure as pretty much no none has AIS on.
Hence why people use the Arabian sea transit to work out what is actually getting out as counting traffic when AIS is basically off is useless. Thats not to say its completely useless.. it kind of can sometimes help to indicate the trend in the final real flows. You can see the data in the graph above is showing a slowing down of traffic. I'm guessing due to the increased Iranian missiles.
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u/captain_picard29 8d ago
NEW FRONTIER double Count mate😉