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Brent fell to about $91 in late May 2026, down roughly 19 per cent on the month on optimism over a ‘largely negotiated’ deal. The deflation from the $126 peak separates two risks that were previously bundled: about $35 of war-and-blockade premium has left, while roughly $20 a barrel of institutional premium stays. That residual — about $2 billion a day — is the price of the institutional gap, now visible directly in the crude strip.

On 10 May 2026, the Qatari LNG carrier Al Kharaitiyat transited Hormuz on the Tehran-approved corridor to Pakistan under a government-to-government LNG arrangement. The transit is the cleanest available case study of the bilateral carve-out pattern. This post reads the transit in detail, explains why the bilateral mechanism cannot scale to the broader LNG market, and identifies what an institutional default would replace it with.

On 18-19 May 2026, Iranian state-affiliated reporting disclosed ‘Hormuz Safe,’ a crypto-settled state-backed marine insurance product for vessels using the PGSA corridor. The launch lands the day after the PGSA formal announcement. This post reads what Hormuz Safe can and cannot do relative to the International Group P&I cover the global operator class actually uses, and what a treaty-backed authority would do differently.

Additional War Risk Premiums on Gulf tanker transits sit around 1% of hull value per seven-day period, with stranded tankers paying up to 10%. All 12 International Group P&I Clubs gave 72 hours’ notice cancelling parts of war cover in the Gulf. The underwriter-side gatekeeping is, in effect, a chokepoint closure no government has formally declared. This post reads what an institutional answer would change about that.

Brent rose about 3.8 per cent on 4 May 2026 after the Project Freedom announcement and an Iranian missile claim, after pulling toward $108 earlier in the week on peace-proposal hopes. Earlier posts have documented the chokepoint risk premium as a level. This post documents it as a volatility — a directly priced cost in hedging premia, surcharge widths, insurance loadings, and rate-case adjustments that accrues every day the institutional state of the chokepoint is undefined.

Brent touched $126 overnight on April 30 — highest since 2022 — before pulling back to about $114. Both halves of the move are informative. The spike priced an option that the Iranian new-chapter announcement and the US blockade extension might converge into further escalation; the pullback un-priced part of that option as the news cycle settled. The chokepoint risk premium is now the marginal component of global crude price.

On April 29, real-time tracking showed three to eight Hormuz transits in 24 hours against a pre-crisis baseline of about 60 vessels per day. Five per cent of normal. The post walks through what is and is not still moving, what a treaty-backed authority’s monthly statistical bulletin would record, and why the throughput floor is an institutional fact rather than only a military one.

Brent closed at $118 and WTI at $107 on April 29 after Trump said the US blockade of Iran will continue until a nuclear deal. US gasoline is forecast at $4.30/gal for the month. Walking a single gallon back to the tanker shows the chokepoint fee is small. The chokepoint risk is what is doing the work in your fill-up.

On 25 April OFAC sanctioned Hengli Petrochemical (Dalian), China’s second-largest teapot refinery, for buying Iranian crude, plus 40 shadow-fleet vessels, plus the named Iranian Armed Forces General Staff oil-sales arm Sepehr Energy. Combined with yesterday’s $344M USDT freeze, three of the four legs of the Hormuz toll architecture have been entity-mapped in 48 hours. The Suez and Panama models have no off-grid leg because they are treaty-backed.

No loaded LNG tanker has exited Hormuz since late February. Qatar’s seventy-seven million tonne capacity at Ras Laffan, roughly twenty percent of global LNG, has no pipeline alternative. Shell declared force majeure 11 March. Full operations are not expected until August. The governance question is whether the eight-week vacuum becomes a sixteen-week vacuum.