Hormuz's crude recovery hides a slower one for LNG, fertilizer, helium, and aluminum

Oil was the easy cargo, and the rest of the Gulf’s exports haven’t caught up. Middle East crude exports ended September at roughly their pre-war levels and topped them on several days, Reuters reports. Diesel and gasoline shipments are running at 58% of pre-war volumes, JPMorgan analysts said. LNG, fertilizer, aluminum, and helium are recovering more slowly still, Asharq Business reports.

Why it matters: For anyone buying gas, fertilizer, or metal from the Gulf, the crude numbers make Hormuz look closer to normal than it is. What’s holding the other cargoes back is a mix of cost, routing, and war damage, and some of that damage will take years to repair even after the strait reopens.

Our take: Crude has the margins to pay its own way. Supertanker rates from the Middle East to China hit a record USD 656k per day in late August, more than 10 times their level a year earlier, and TotalEnergies' CEO put the cost of moving a single cargo through Hormuz at around USD 20 mn. That bill is easy to absorb when TotalEnergies is buying Gulf crude at USD 50-60 per barrel with Brent above USD 90 per barrel.

No way around: LNG and helium

Qatar's LNG is getting through more often, but buyers still can’t plan around it. Four carriers loaded at Ras Laffan resurfaced outside Hormuz last weekend after making largely untracked crossings, following at least five loaded vessels spotted outside the Gulf since mid-September. In August, there were none. QatarEnergy is still extending force majeure, with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and at least one Indian buyer shut out until November, and Italy's Edison until early December.

There’s no pipeline to fall back on: Qatar went into the crisis exporting around 77-80 mn tons of LNG a year, roughly a fifth of global supply, with no meaningful bypass around Hormuz. Ship-to-ship transfers can’t carry anything close to that volume. Qatar's share of Taiwan's helium imports fell from nearly 88% to about 30% in 1H 2026, as US supply jumped to nearly 60% from under 4%, and its share of South Korea's fell to about 34% from 55%, Taiwan News reported in July.

Fertilizers’ bypass runs on thousands of trucks

Fertilizer has no easy escape route: Unlike crude, producers have no pipeline escape route and generally have less room to absorb elevated freight and war-risk costs, Wolfgang Lehmacher, former head of supply chain and transport industries at the World Economic Forum, tells EnterpriseAM.

Then the bottleneck moves inside the plant. “Vessel shortages trigger initial shocks, but storage saturation and continuous-process chemistry quickly become primary operational bottlenecks. Synthesis loops (ammonia, urea, phosphates) require constant off-take. While facilities deploy thermal loops to manage hazardous inputs like molten sulphur, operating at minimum load without off-take rapidly exhausts buffer capacity,” Lehmacher says.

Gulf fertilizer has a land route, and it takes enormous truck fleets to move. Saudi Arabia has been trucking urea west since May, and UAE producers have redirected cargo toward Fujairah for loading alongside Omani material. It took Sabic about 1.3k trucks to move a single 25k-ton urea cargo from Jubail to Yanbu, and Ma’aden deployed some 3.5k trucks to move phosphate fertilizer from Ras Al Khair toward Yanbu.

Even if roads can move it — but not all ports can load it. Scaling that workaround to mns of tons would overwhelm road capacity and destroy the economics of low-margin bulk cargoes, Lehmacher argues. Meanwhile, Red sea terminals can’t necessarily replicate the specialized loading infrastructure available at Gulf ports.

By sea, the trade has barely restarted: Roughly a third of seaborne fertilizer trade crossed Hormuz before the war, but only eight urea vessels left Gulf waters in September, up from two in August, and ammonia has all but stopped, Asharq added, citing Argus Media.

The squeeze runs as far as Morocco: Gulf countries supply around 44% of global seaborne sulfur exports, which phosphate fertilizer makers need as feedstock. Morocco's fertilizer giant OCP imports some 3.7 mn tons a year from the region.

Sulfur is much harder to replace: Urea production can shift toward other gas-rich producers when Gulf supply is disrupted but sulfur is concentrated around oil and gas processing hubs and has far fewer substitutions, Lehmacher says. That makes a Gulf sulfur shortfall a much more rigid constraint on phosphate fertilizer production.

Some of the losses will outlast the strait

A reopened Hormuz would still leave Qatar short of LNG for years. Two Ras Laffan trains hit by earlier strikes are still offline, removing 12.8 mn tons a year, about 17% of Qatar's LNG capacity, with repairs expected to take three to five years.

Aluminum is on a shorter clock, but its shipments are still tied to the strait: Gulf smelters supply roughly 9% of the world's primary aluminum. Emirates Global Aluminium had restarted 25% of its reduction cells at Al Taweelah by late August and expects hot metal production to reach pre-incident levels in 1Q 2027. Shipments won't return to pre-incident levels until Hormuz reopens, the company says.

So what does normal actually look like? Trade normalization would be indicated by war-risk ins surcharges returning to pre-crisis levels, major regional producers securing spot and contract charters over multiple weeks, idled ammonia loops and gas-sweetening facilities being fully recommissioned, and sulfur-price spreads across China, India, and Brazil narrowing, Lehmaher notes. Another signal would be the resolution of the 30-40 days dry-bulk vessel ballasting lag as tonnage returns to Gulf berths, he adds.