Why the price of oil should fall: without politics: just data and common sense.

Let's start with a brief overview - about the Strait of Hormuz that says:

“At its narrowest point, it is only 39 kilometres wide. Yet, according to the International Energy Agency, roughly 20 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products passed through it every day in 2025. That was about a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade.”

So, of course, a serious disruption there matters. The initial price shock is visible in the oil chart. But does that mean prices have to stay elevated until politicians reach an agreement? Or could something change while the conflict continues?

The conflict is reflected in the price instantly:

This is what I want to look at. Not whether the headlines sound frightening. I want to know how much oil is still finding its way to the market.

What does the chart actually show?

The IEA’s February factsheet identified limited spare capacity on Saudi and UAE pipelines that could bypass Hormuz. Those routes already existed before the war. They were not a complete replacement for the strait, but neither was the region entirely dependent on a single exit.

The Strait of Hormuz is the primary export route for oil produced by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, Bahrain and Iran.

Available capacity on alternative export routes is limited. Only Saudi Arabia and the UAE have operational crude pipelines that could potentially re-route flows to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, with an estimated 3.5 to 5.5 mb/d of available capacity.

UAE – the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline (ADCOP) runs 400 km from onshore oil facilities at Habshan to Fujairah. The original nameplate capacity of the line is 1.5 mb/d with a reported current capacity close to 1.8 mb/d.

Saudi Arabia – the Abqaiq-Yanbu pipeline system (East-West Crude Pipeline or Petroline) crosses Saudi Arabia, connecting Abqaiq to Yanbu on the Red Sea. The system is composed of two lines with a total design capacity of 5 mb/d of crude oil. 

There is also a natural gas liquids pipeline running parallel to the Petroline, the Abqaiq-Yanbu NGL pipeline, with a capacity of 300 kb/d, which is fully utilised.

Iran – the Jask oil terminal to transport crude oil from the Goreh-Jask pipeline to Jask on the Gulf of Oman. The pipeline has a reported capacity of 1 mb/d. The pipeline has a reported capacity of 1 mb/d. However, the pipeline and port effectively remain non-operational.

Now let’s look at the Strait of Hormuz Trade Tracker, developed by the WTO and AXSMarine. The crude-oil chart gives the impression that almost everything has stopped.

Read a dramatic headline alongside it, and the conclusion practically writes itself.

And looking at this graph, it seems that the movement of oil has literally stopped.

But I will argue that the movement of oil from the Region is as large or even larger than before the conflict!

So – the starting point for us is the Strait of Hormuz with an average daily volume of 20 million barrels per day before the conflict. Let's take a closer look at what is happening in the Strait of Hormuz now.

The dashboard captures voyages only while vessels are transmitting their Automatic Identification System, or AIS, signals. The WTO explicitly warns that movements during AIS interruptions are not captured and actual volumes may therefore be understated.

Therefore switching off a transmitter does not make the oil disappear. It makes the journey harder to observe. Kpler, a real-time global trade and commodity intelligence service that tracks maritime vessel movements and the physical flow of goods across international markets, describes how satellite imagery, vessel movements and cargo evidence are used to reconstruct these “dark” journeys.

The chart is not lying. But it is answering a narrower question than “How much oil is leaving the Middle East?” That distinction changes quite a lot.

Fewer visible ships do not automatically mean fewer barrels

The provisional October 2 Lloyd’s List snapshot used in my charts shows recorded crude-tanker crossings rising from 1.9 a day in March to 9.5 in September, against 22.1 before the war. Of September’s 284 crude-tanker crossings, 281 were classified retrospectively as dark transits. These are preliminary observations, not a final count.

Lloud’s list: The recovery is not the same everywhere. In that snapshot, product-tanker crossings averaged only 2.5 a day in September, compared with 20 before the war. Across all covered vessel types, September averaged 18.1 crossings a day against 112 before the war – roughly 16% of the old traffic count.

Product tankers – the recovery remains weaker.

Recorded transits/day averaged 4.2 in June and 2.5 in September; pre-war average: 20.0. September: 54 of 75 crossings were classified as dark (72.0%). Vessel category does not establish cargo type or quantity actually carried.

According to Lloyd’s List — Spotlight Data:

That sounds terrible. But 16% of the crossings does not mean 16% of the oil. The figures cover different ship types and both directions. Vessel sizes and loading levels matter, and oil exported through a bypass never needs to appear in a Hormuz crossing count.

My research notes also cite a separate CNBC/Kpler estimate of 13.5 million barrels a day through Hormuz over the seven days to September 28. I treat that as a reported estimate, not something the vessel-count charts independently prove. The dates and coverage are different.

For a directly published volume reconstruction, Kpler estimated that 9.9 million barrels a day of non-Iranian crude crossed Hormuz during September 1–28. Even that longer-period figure is a very different picture from oil movement having stopped.

To sum it up:

Let’s move on to Saudi Arabia’s East–West Pipeline. It carries crude across the country to Yanbu on the Red Sea, avoiding Hormuz. Aramco confirmed that the pipeline reached its maximum capacity of 7 million barrels a day during the first quarter of 2026.

In the first quarter of this year, the pipeline was operating at full capacity (7 million barrels per day). On September 11, it suffered a drone attack – as a result of which the entire pipeline was closed, for security reasons. It was returned to service on September 22, currently operating at approximately 3–3.5 million barrels per day, with a partial restoration to a volume of ~5.8 mbpd expected in a few more weeks. When it will return to full capacity – it is not yet known. 

Let's move on - East west crude oil Pipeline.Let's move on - In addition to the East–West pipeline, another bypass of Hormuz is the UAE pipeline to Fujairah. This is the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline, also called the Habshan–Fujairah pipeline. The oil arrives overland at the Fujairah terminal, which is located outside Hormuz. From there, tankers no longer have to cross the strait.

According to Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline LLC (ADCOP), the state-owned oil company of Abu Dhabi: The UAE has another route: the approximately 406-kilometre Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline, also known as the Habshan–Fujairah pipeline. It carries crude overland to Fujairah, outside Hormuz, where tankers can load without passing through the strait.

Kpler reported a September crude-export record of 2.53 million barrels a day in its discussion of ADNOC’s increased Fujairah shipments, compared with ADCOP’s 1.8 million-barrel daily capacity. It suggested that stored oil helped bridge the difference, including supplies from underground caverns with 42 million barrels of capacity.

That last number is storage capacity, not proof that the caverns are full. But the practical point is straightforward: Fujairah is more than a pipe ending at the coast. Storage can support exports above the pipeline’s incoming flow for a period. It cannot do so indefinitely.

And not all the adaptation involves pipelines. Kpler describes shuttle tankers crossing Hormuz and transferring crude to other vessels off Fujairah or Sohar. Those ship-to-ship transfers do not bypass the strait, and they do not create extra barrels. They are a different way of organising the journey.

So, this is simple as that: producers still want to sell and buyers still want deliveries. I would not assume that everyone simply sits around waiting for a political announcement.

To sum this all up:

It is difficult to understand the real picture at the moment, but looking at the data as a whole, we see a paradox: the market visually shows a catastrophe – the number of ships in the Strait of Hormuz has fallen to ~16% of the pre-war level. However, the real volumes of oil from the region have returned to pre-war levels or even exceeded them.

Kpler at the end of September recorded total Middle East oil exports in the range of 18–22 mbpd,  depending on the accounting methodology.

Goldman Sachs (including dark cargoes) calculates 23.3 mbpd per day. JPMorgan estimates crude oil exports at 98% of the pre-war level. The mechanism has changed dramatically – but the oil is flowing.

The strait, which was theoretically "closed" by Iran, is now just one of several routes. East-West Pipeline, ADCOP to Fujairah, STS transshipment at Sohar and Fujairah, dark tankers – all these channels together form a system that is extremely difficult to completely block.

Moreover, Saudi Arabia used the crisis to not only bypass the strait, but also fundamentally increase production to ~11.5–12 mbpd, the highest figure since the April 2020 price war.

The conclusion is simple: a political agreement to open Hormuz is no longer a prerequisite for oil flow from the region. The physical flow of oil has already resumed.

This is also confirmed in a way by the crude oil price chart. After a sharp rise at the beginning of the conflict, the price is now below the $100 mark.

The question is – how stable are these bypasses? Time will tell, but we can already see – the oil flow in the region is quite flexible. And this is yet another proof – we find the data and follow it. And don’t blindly read the headlines!

Stay tuned!

Agris