{"id":259153,"date":"2026-08-21T14:39:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T14:39:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/259153\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T14:39:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T14:39:13","slug":"u-s-military-guides-oil-tankers-through-strait-of-hormuz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/259153\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. military guides oil tankers through Strait of Hormuz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since early May, U.S. military escorts have enabled tankers to move more than 660 million barrels of crude through the Strait of Hormuz, Central Command told CNBC<\/a> this week, with around 1,300 commercial vessels receiving assistance over that span.<\/p>\n

U.S. Navy Captain Tim Hawkins, a Central Command spokesperson, said in a statement Thursday that “multiple routes remain free and open for commercial transit.” Taken together with the July 29 figure, the updated total implies that over 160 million barrels \u2014 a rate exceeding 7 million barrels per day \u2014 cleared the strait in the most recent three-week stretch. A July 29 statement from the military put the cumulative total at 500 million barrels assisted through Hormuz since May.<\/p>\n

Even so, the throughput remains a fraction of what the strait handled before the conflict, a period when the combined flow of crude and petroleum products reached around 20 million barrels per day. U.S. officials told Axios on Wednesday that about 10 million barrels per day have exited the strait in recent weeks. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Aug. 11 that the seven-day average had risen to nearly 9 million barrels per day.<\/p>\n

Private tracking firms put the numbers lower. Windward, a maritime intelligence firm, tracked a month-over-month progression in crude flows \u2014 from around 1.6 million barrels per day in May to roughly 4 million in June and approximately 5 million in July \u2014 and expects August to post a further increase. Michelle Wiese Bockmann, a senior maritime intelligence analyst at Windward, pointed to covert ship movements as one reason the independent tallies lag government figures \u2014 an explanation Wright has also offered, arguing in a social media post that private trackers miss vessels operating without transponders and that the Department of Energy, working alongside the military, holds the most reliable count.<\/p>\n

“My assessment is that it’s scaling and it’s scaling quickly despite the fact that Iran is placing enormous pressure on maritime security,” Bockmann said, according to CNBC. Gulf producers, she added, have the backing of U.S. naval escorts and are “ready to do whatever they can” to push more oil through the waterway.<\/p>\n

The security situation in the strait remains contested. Tehran declared Tuesday that Hormuz will remain closed until Washington fulfills its commitments under the June 17 interim peace deal, a position President Donald Trump has rejected, maintaining publicly that the strait is open and American-controlled. American forces escort commercial traffic through a southern corridor hugging the Omani shoreline and have blockaded Iranian ports, while Tehran insists ships take a northern path through Iranian waters \u2014 and warns those that do not of potential attack.<\/p>\n

The International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, recorded at least 17 attacks on commercial vessels in the waters around the strait during July and August, with the toll reaching at least four sailors killed and more than a dozen wounded.<\/p>\n

The breakdown of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire reversed a nascent recovery in Gulf oil output<\/a>, with the International Energy Agency cutting its 2026 global oil supply forecast to 102 million barrels per day and projecting a global market deficit of 1.8 million barrels per day in the third quarter. Middle East loadings had touched 20 million barrels per day at the start of July before retreating to roughly 12 million barrels per day as the waterway effectively closed again and attacks on tankers resumed, the IEA said.<\/p>\n

Tracking exactly how much oil is moving through Hormuz is difficult. Bridget Diakun, maritime intelligence and research director at Lloyd’s List, said ships often transit at night while satellite imagery is taken in the morning. “There’s a lot of unknowns,” she said at a Thursday briefing. Bockmann noted that the financial incentives are considerable: vessels completing the passage can gross roughly $500,000 per day, and crew members are typically offered two to three times their normal wages. “It’s a very intense, serious operation to get the oil out \u2014 high risk, high profit,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since early May, U.S. military escorts have enabled tankers to move more than 660 million barrels of crude…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259154,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[13714,2656,5309,45306,2177,102,47724,71282,101,1769,1527],"class_list":["post-259153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-strait-of-hormuz","tag-barrels-per-day","tag-central-command","tag-commercial-vessels","tag-cumulative-total","tag-gulf-oil","tag-hormuz","tag-maritime-intelligence","tag-michelle-wiese-bockmann","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-tim-hawkins","tag-u-s-navy"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117134017367611251","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}