KplerPosts by

The crisis taught the world’s shipping to go dark. By May, more than two-thirds of non-Iranian transits through Hormuz were switching off AIS, carrying legitimate UAE, Qatari, Kuwaiti, and Iraqi oil through Gulf-of-Oman transfers with transponders off. The dark-fleet tactic, pioneered for sanctions evasion, became a commercial norm for allied oil, and the transparency the market depends on broke in a way that cannot be unseen. A governed strait makes identified transit a condition of passage. This post reads the opacity the vacuum normalized.

Six transits on 3 May, five on 4 May — Project Freedom’s first day. The pre-war baseline is approximately 138 vessels per day. Five is roughly 3.6 per cent of normal and is probably the lowest single-day reading in the present crisis. The operational ratio of approximately 3,000 US service members per transit, against a Suez Canal Authority ratio of about 150 staff per transit, is the picture of a convoy operation rather than an institutional one.

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.

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.