Hormuz attacks hit a wartime peak just as oil flows were recovering

Attacks on ships near Hormuz are running at their fastest pace of the war, and the bill is landing on the tanker market. Gulf crude is still getting out through bypass routes and ship-to-ship transfers, but each barrel now takes more ships and more money to move. Average global supertanker earnings hit a record USD 805k a day last week.

Sunday was the worst day yet, with six vessels hit, according to the Financial Times’s count of UK Maritime Trade Operations reports. Three were refined product tankers, two were crude tankers owned by China’s New Treasure Shipping and South Korea’s Sinokor, and one was an Indian container ship, maritime security firm Vanguard says.

That puts the attack rate at nearly double the war’s previous peak. Some 24 ships were hit in the two weeks to earlier this week October, compared with 13 in the first two weeks of March, the next most intense stretch, the FT reports, citing UKMTO reports and European security sources.

October wiped out September’s recovery

Gulf oil outflows averaged 15.5 mn bbl / d in September, their highest since the war began. Only 2.9 mn barrels moved through the strait earlier this week, the lowest daily figure this month, , according to Kpler data published on Tuesday. The seven-day average is running about 43% below pre-conflict levels, though Kpler says it may revise Sunday’s number upward as satellites pick up more vessels.

Ship traffic tells the same story, at about a fifth of normal: Vessels made c. 29 transits a day in the 72 hours to Sunday, against a historical average of c. 138, according to US naval data relayed by the Joint Maritime Information Center.

Some owners who sent ships through the strait for the high rates are now taking them elsewhere. At least 10 VLCCs and several Suezmax tankers have halted or reversed course near Fujairah in recent days. Some have sailed for US Gulf ports, where a global tanker shortage keeps rates high at a fraction of the risk, the FT adds.

The bypass routers are holding, but they’re slow

Ports outside the strait picked up the slack through early October: Loadings from the Gulf of Oman coast and the Red Sea more than doubled to 6.7 mn bbl / d in the week to 6 October, keeping total Middle East crude exports at pre-war levels, Reuters reported citing Kpler data. Those figures predate the Sunday attacks.

The workarounds take time: A ship-to-ship transfer off Oman now takes nearly 10 days, up from five to seven, as vessels wait for tugboats and transfer crews, and two VLCCs have moved Gulf crude onto other supertankers as far away as India’s Gulf of Kutch.

Those delays are also pulling Japanese tankers back toward the region. Japanese refiners had relied on ship-to-ship transfers far from the war, off India and in Southeast Asia such as off Malaysia, which kept their ships safe but left them dependent on sellers. As freight costs climb, their own supertankers are loading near the Gulf of Oman again. Idemitsu Maru landed in Japan this month with Omani crude, Idemitsu’s Apollo Energy has left Fujairah with Murban, and at least two more Japanese VLCCs are due at Fujairah in the coming days, Bloomberg reports, citing Kpler data and shipbrokers.

It’s a cautious return from a country that gets nearly all its crude from the Middle East. The region supplied 93% of Japan’s c. 823 mn barrels of crude imports in 2025, according to Kpler. None of the returning ships has entered the Gulf, and Idemitsu says its position on Hormuz transits is unchanged. It’s “a selective return rather than a wholesale shift into higher-risk waters,” Hidenori Watanave of the University of Tokyo told Bloomberg.

Egypt is catching only a slice of the diversion: Sumed can move 2.5 mn bbl / d, about half of the East-West pipeline’s roughly 5 mn bbl / d, and about 80% of Saudi Red Sea crude exports have passed Bab El Mandab since March.

A supertanker voyage now costs more than a rocket launch

Slow tanker transfers and longer routes mean the market needs more tankers to move the same oil: Between the detours, rising cargo volumes, and long-haul Red Sea flows, crude tanker demand is up more than 13%, Clarksons estimates.

On one US route, freight now costs almost half as much as the oil itself. One US booking was accepted at about USD 41 / bbl, roughly 45% of WTI’s price near USD 91, against an average of USD 4.50 last year. A US-to-China supertanker voyage costs about USD 80 mn, more than the USD 74 mn price of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch.

OUR TAKE- The Hormuz squeeze is now about tanker capacity more than crude supply. The bypass routes are doing their job, but every extra day at anchor off Oman takes another ship out of service, and the market is paying for it at record rates.