Is Oil Flowing Through the Strait of Hormuz?
No — the Strait of Hormuz is severely restricted as of 2026-07-25, roughly day 147 of the disruption that began 2026-02-28. IMF PortWatch shows about 12 commercial ship arrivals per day (7-day average), ~16% of the pre-crisis ~74/day baseline.
As of . Headline verdict anchored to IMF PortWatch satellite transit data.
The numbers behind the answer
What this means
The Strait of Hormuz normally carries about 20 million barrels of oil per day — crude, condensate and refined products — which is roughly 20% of global petroleum consumption and the single most important oil chokepoint in the world. About a fifth of the world's LNG (mostly Qatari) also transits Hormuz. So the question “is oil flowing?” is really a question about how much of that ~20 Mbpd is still getting through, and at what cost.
The headline verdict above is anchored to IMF PortWatchsatellite transit data rather than to our own AIS oil-exit count. That is deliberate: AIS transponder signals are self-reported, and tankers operating near Iranian waters routinely switch their transponders off (“go dark”), so any AIS-derived oil-transit count is a lower bound— the true flow is higher than the observed number. PortWatch counts ship arrivals from satellite imagery, which is far harder to spoof, but it publishes on a roughly weekly cadence, so the freshest satellite figure may lag the live AIS picture by a few days.
Right now that flow is well below normal. Even so, low observed transit does not mean zero oil is moving: war-risk insurance for Gulf transits is currently running at about 15x the peacetime baseline, which raises the delivered cost of every barrel that does move. Bypass pipelines — the Saudi East-West (Petroline, ~5 Mbpd), UAE ADCOP (~1.5 Mbpd), Iran's Goreh-Jask line and the Iraq-Turkey Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline — provide only ~3.5–5.5 Mbpd of spare capacity against the ~20 Mbpd that normally transits, so they cannot fully replace the strait. For high-stakes decisions, cross-reference IMF PortWatch, Kpler, Vortexa and Lloyd's List alongside this dashboard.