The US military is escorting ships that transport around 7 million barrels of oil and petroleum products through the Strait of Hormuz every day, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at a briefing in Houston.
According to him, the volume of shipments currently passing under US military protection “amounts to roughly half of pre-war levels of transit through the Strait of Hormuz”. Before hostilities broke out between the US, Israel and Iran, around 20 million barrels of oil passed through this maritime corridor every day.
Wright noted that around 5 million barrels per day had been successfully rerouted via alternative routes, notably pipelines, whilst global oil production had increased by approximately 1 million barrels per day.
According to the US official’s estimates, this left a transport shortfall of around 14 million barrels per day. Currently, around half of this volume is already passing through the Strait of Hormuz under military escort.
“Today’s flows are approaching half of that gap, and they are growing,” Wright said.
The Strait of Hormuz remains one of the world’s most vital energy routes, through which a significant portion of global oil exports from the Gulf states passes.
The United States has imposed a naval blockade on Iran since 13 April, and the Iranian armed forces have opened fire on some vessels to prevent them from passing through the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf.
In recent months, US forces have intercepted several commercial vessels and tankers in the Indian Ocean.