World Shipping Chokepoints: Live Oil Transit Status
3 of the 6 major maritime oil chokepoints tracked here are currently disrupted — Strait of Hormuz, Suez Canal + SUMED, Bab el-Mandeb — together accounting for about 38 million barrels per day of the roughly 66 Mbpd that normally moves through these routes.
As of . Hormuz status is computed live; other chokepoints are tracked from public reporting.
At a glance
Every major chokepoint, ranked by volume
| Chokepoint | Flow | Share | Narrowest | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strait of MalaccaSoutheast Asia | 23.7 Mbpd | ~30% | 2.7 km | OPEN~100% of normal |
| Strait of HormuzPersian Gulf | 20 Mbpd | ~25% | 33 km | SEVERELY RESTRICTED~0% of normal |
| Suez Canal + SUMEDEgypt | 9.2 Mbpd | ~12% | 0.3 km | RESTRICTED~65% of normal |
| Bab el-MandebRed Sea / Gulf of Aden | 8.8 Mbpd | ~11% | 32 km | RESTRICTED~55% of normal |
| Turkish Straits (Bosporus + Dardanelles)Turkey | 3 Mbpd | ~4% | 0.7 km | OPEN~100% of normal |
| Panama CanalCentral America | 1.1 Mbpd | ~1% | 0.1 km | OPEN~95% of normal |
Alternative routes, and what they cost
- Strait of Malacca
- Sunda Strait (longer + shallower)
- Lombok Strait (deep but +1000nm)
- Strait of Hormuz
- Iraq-Turkey (Kirkuk-Ceyhan) pipeline ~1.6 Mbpd
- Saudi East-West (Petroline) ~5 Mbpd
- UAE ADCOP (Habshan-Fujairah) ~1.5 Mbpd
- Suez Canal + SUMED
- Cape of Good Hope reroute (+14-21 days)
- Bab el-Mandeb
- Cape of Good Hope reroute (+14-21 days)
- Turkish Straits (Bosporus + Dardanelles)
- No alternative for Russian/Caspian export to Mediterranean
- Panama Canal
- Cape Horn (+14 days)
Why Hormuz is the one that matters most
By raw throughput the Strait of Malacca is marginally the busier route. But Hormuz is consistently treated as the more critical chokepoint, for two reasons that are easy to miss when comparing the headline volumes side by side.
First, the two are sequential, not independent. A large share of the oil that later passes through Malacca left the Gulf and had already transited Hormuz. Losing Hormuz therefore reduces Malacca volumes too; the barrels are counted twice, but they only exist once.
Second, and more decisively, Hormuz has the weakest alternatives. Suez and Bab el-Mandeb traffic can round the Cape of Good Hope at a cost of two to three weeks per voyage — painful and inflationary, since it ties up fleet capacity worldwide, but possible. Malacca has the Sunda and Lombok Straits. Panama has Cape Horn. Hormuz has only pipelines: the Saudi East-West line, UAE ADCOP and the Iraq–Turkey Kirkuk–Ceyhan route, offering perhaps 3.5 to 5.5 Mbpd of spare capacity against the ~20 Mbpd that normally transits. There is no sea route around it, because the Gulf has no second exit.
The Turkish Straits are worth noting as the other true no-alternative case: Russian and Caspian crude reaching the Mediterranean has no other path. The volume is far smaller, but the substitution elasticity is just as bad.