Hormuz crude transit under conflict risk: documented flows, not slogans
The Strait of Hormuz is not a metaphor. It is a narrow waterway between Oman and Iran that connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, and it is deep and wide enough for the world's largest crude tankers. When regional conflict raises the risk that tankers cannot pass safely, or that loadings inside the Gulf cannot clear the strait, the global oil balance shifts through freight, insurance, delayed cargoes, and, in severe cases, shut-in production upstream of the chokepoint.
Analysis of that risk has to start from documented flow volumes rather than assumed outage percentages. The U.S. Energy Information Administration's World Oil Transit Chokepoints tables put total oil flows through Hormuz at 21.8 million barrels per day in 2023 and 20.7 million barrels per day in 2024, with 20.9 million barrels per day in the first half of 2025. An EIA Today in Energy piece archived from mid-2025 rounded 2024 oil flow through the strait at 20 million barrels per day, or about 20 percent of global petroleum liquids consumption, and noted that first-quarter 2025 flows remained relatively flat compared with 2024.
The same analysis linked part of the 2022 to 2024 decline in crude and condensate transit to OPEC+ voluntary crude cuts that lowered exports from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, to Aramco's shift of some seaborne crude toward the East-West pipeline and Red Sea ports after Bab al-Mandeb disruption, and to more refining capacity inside the Gulf that absorbed crude locally. Country shares matter for who loses barrels first if the strait tightens.
LNG is part of the same geography even when the analytical question is oil. EIA's chokepoint tables show LNG flows through Hormuz at 10.6 billion cubic feet per day in 2023, 10.5 in 2024, and 11.4 in the first half of 2025. For importing economies, including those in South Asia that buy Middle East crude on the water, the planning question is landed cost and arrival timing under documented chokepoint statistics. The public record does not provide a daily loss figure for a hypothetical full closure, nor Iranian export prices. Making energy security add up means treating Hormuz as a measured corridor with published throughput history and limited documented bypasses.