Important article on the closing of the Gulf of Hormuz

Both countries (Australia and New Zealand) turned to the United States for emergency supply. In April 2026, eleven tankers were en route from the US to Australia, most carrying diesel and petrol. Shipping costs for fuel tankers exploded from roughly 20,000 dollars per day to over 300,000 dollars per day. Some vessels took 40-day routes around Africa or through the Panama Canal at 8.5 million dollars more per voyage than the usual Asian supply route.

The US did not just sell oil. The US kept Australian trucks moving and New Zealand supermarkets stocked. If the US restricts refined product exports, which analysts predict a Trump administration will do as domestic inventories hit operational floors, those tankers vanish. Australia and New Zealand do not get outbid. Australia and New Zealand get excluded. The global market becomes a closed club, and the countries that closed their own refineries to save money discover they cannot buy their way back into the club.

CHINA BOUGHT THE WORLD FOUR MONTHS. THE STRAIT IS CLOSING AGAIN, AND THIS TIME THE THIN RESERVE IS AMERICAN

By Mark A. Shryock

Mark A. Shryock

Jul 11, 2026

Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has fallen to almost nothing again this week. No large vessel has crossed the US-coordinated southern shipping lane while broadcasting its position since July 7, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence. Before the war started, about 130 vessels a day made that crossing.

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Iran struck the Qatari-flagged LNG tanker Al-Rekayyat with a drone, hit a second tanker with an unidentified projectile that caused structural damage, and attacked a third vessel off Oman that caught fire, all in under 24 hours on July 7 and 8. Iran retaliated further with strikes on Bahrain and Kuwait. The United States revoked Iran’s waiver to sell oil on international markets the same day, effective immediately, with any Iranian oil already at sea required to be wound down by July 17. President Trump said at a NATO summit in Ankara that the ceasefire was over.

Brent crude is trading near 76 to 77 dollars a barrel as of this morning, up more than 6 percent for the week. WTI is near 72 dollars. TD Securities is forecasting Brent could climb another 10 to 15 dollars a barrel into August as inventories keep falling. Technical talks between Washington and Tehran are still happening despite the strikes, and analysts are describing a pattern at this point: Iran tests the line, the US retaliates, both sides pull back to talk, then it happens again. The cycle is not resolved. The cycle is live, and the cycle restarted this week.

MY TAKE ON THE JULY IEA REPORT

The International Energy Agency’s July Oil Market Report, covering June, landed this week. The headline numbers look good: global supply up 4.1 million barrels a day to 98.8 million, Gulf exports surging 6.5 million barrels a day to 16.1 million, inventories rising for the first time in four months. North Sea Dated crude fell to 68 dollars a barrel by early July, actually 2 dollars below where the benchmark stood before the war started. The IEA had been forecasting the market tipping into surplus in 2027.

My take is that the recovery happened inside a ceasefire that was already breaking. The report itself warns the renewed fighting threatens to derail the surplus forecast. The report also puts a harder number on something more important than the headline supply rebound. China’s first confirmed drawdown of the war was 41 million barrels in June, led by a 37 million barrel easing in non-OECD crude stocks. The 41 million barrel figure is a small fraction of what China avoided importing in the spring. The United States, meanwhile, drew the SPR to a 43-year low doing the supplying China chose not to do.

So the July report is not a story about a market healing. The July report is a story about a market that healed just long enough to get hit again, with less cushion than the market had the first time, and with the two countries that matter most entering the second shock from very different positions.

WHAT CHINA DID IN THE SPRING

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel struck Iran and the war began. Iran responded by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow strip of water between Iran and the United Arab Emirates that roughly one in five barrels of oil on the planet has to pass through to move from the Gulf to the rest of the world. By mid-March, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had mined the strait and was turning back or attacking tankers. Traffic dropped to almost nothing. The International Energy Agency called the disruption the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.

Oil prices did what anyone would expect. Brent went from about 72 dollars a barrel the day before the war to a peak of 126 on April 30. Dubai crude, the benchmark most tied to the Gulf, hit a record 166 on March 19. Gas in the United States hit a four-year high of 4.30 dollars a gallon, over 6 dollars in parts of California. Canada saw prices rise roughly 30 percent in about six weeks.

The Strait of Hormuz normally carries about 20 million barrels of oil a day, a bigger share of global supply than the 1973 Arab oil embargo took off the market. The 1973 embargo more than doubled prices within months and kept climbing. The 2026 shock roughly doubled prices at the peak too, but the 2026 shock never reached the 200 dollar number analysts were floating in March and April. Something absorbed a huge amount of the shock. The something was China.

China buys more oil than any other country on earth, normally around 11 to 12 million barrels a day. In February, right before the war, Chinese seaborne imports were running at about 11.4 million barrels a day. By May the imports had fallen to about 6.4 million barrels a day, and the imports stayed there through June, one of the lowest monthly totals since 2016. The drop is 4 to 5 million barrels a day, sustained for months, confirmed independently by tanker tracking firms Kpler and Vortexa. China did not replace the oil China lost from the Gulf. China simply stopped buying that much. JPMorgan estimated China’s pullback accounted for around three-quarters of the entire drop in global oil trade during that period.

Three things let China do that without the Chinese economy stalling. China had built strategic and commercial reserves estimated between 1.23 and 1.4 billion barrels, enough to run the country for three to four months without importing a drop. On March 5, the Chinese government ordered major refiners including Sinopec and Rongsheng Petrochemical to stop accepting new fuel export contracts, which meant refiners needed to process less crude to keep supplying the domestic market. And Chinese oil demand was already softening for a separate reason: more than half of all new cars sold in China in 2026 were electric, a shift that had already been cutting gasoline demand by roughly a million barrels a day.

There is real disagreement about how much of the pullback was deliberate strategy versus ordinary economic weakness. China’s economy slowed during the period and consumer spending contracted for the first time since the pandemic. Some analysts point to evidence of intent: China stockpiled aggressively in January and February before the war even started, and Chinese state trading companies resold cargoes of West African and Latin American crude rather than bringing the cargoes home, while India and Japan were actively scrambling to replace lost Gulf barrels. Other analysts are more skeptical, noting that Japan’s import drop was actually larger than China’s when adjusted for economy size.

What is not in dispute is the effect. China’s decision not to bid aggressively for replacement oil left several million barrels a day on the market that Gulf-dependent economies across Asia would otherwise have been competing for. The decision kept a bad supply shock from becoming a catastrophic one.

WHERE CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES STAND NOW, SIDE BY SIDE

Here is the comparison that matters right now, because the two countries are not in the same position going into the second closure.

China’s official strategic reserve, estimated at 1.23 to 1.4 billion barrels going into the war, was reported nearly unchanged as of late June. China drew mainly from commercial and corporate stockpiles outside the official reserve, stockpiles that can supply about a million barrels a day for a year. An earlier Kayrros estimate suggested China’s crude inventories rose during the war rather than falling, but the IEA’s July Oil Market Report shows non-OECD crude stocks easing by 37 million barrels in June, led by a 41 million barrel draw in China specifically, the first confirmed drawdown of the war. The 41 million barrel figure is a small fraction of what China avoided buying earlier in the year, and the drawdown came only after Hormuz traffic resumed under the June ceasefire. By May, China’s position had been comfortable enough that China was reportedly considering resuming the refined fuel exports China had curbed back in March. China is a massive net importer of crude, and China spent most of the spring sitting on the cushion while letting the rest of the world absorb the scarcity.

The United States is the opposite case. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve held 415.4 million barrels on February 18, just before the war started. As of the week ending July 3, the SPR holds 319.5 million barrels, the lowest level since April 1983, a drop of roughly 96 million barrels since the war began. The 319.5 million barrel figure is 44.7 percent of the SPR’s 714 million barrel capacity. American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers has publicly warned that the SPR needs to stay above 20 percent of capacity, around 143 million barrels, to remain operational, and Sommers said the country is approaching levels that raise concern.

The SPR is not the only US buffer that is gone. Total US inventories, SPR plus commercial stocks combined, fell to 734 million barrels as of June 26, the lowest level since 1984, down 120.7 million barrels since the war began. Commercial crude stocks fell for a tenth straight week to 408.4 million barrels, about 7 percent below the five-year seasonal average. Gasoline stocks sat at 214 million barrels, also 7 percent below average. Distillate stocks, the diesel and heating oil that trucking and food logistics run on, stood at 108.6 million barrels as of June 26, about 8 percent below average. Distillate had already hit the lowest level since 2005 in early May, and distillate has not meaningfully recovered since. Refinery utilization is running at 96.6 percent with crude inputs around 17.2 million barrels a day, which leaves little slack if supply tightens further.

The reason the US drew its own reserves down so hard is that the US became the supplier of last resort. US Central Command says the US has facilitated the transit of more than 380 million barrels of crude oil and over 800 commercial vessels through the strait since early May alone, escorting tankers other nations would not otherwise move. A New York Times analysis comparing shipping between the start of the war and May 8 found the US saw the largest revenue gain of any country from the disrupted market, about 50 billion dollars, more than Russia’s roughly 15 billion dollar gain, as American crude and products filled the gap left by Gulf producers who could not move oil through the strait.

So the structural picture is clear. China is the country that historically received a third of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz, and China spent the spring protecting the Chinese reserve while under-buying on the open market. The United States, which imports relatively little oil through Hormuz directly, spent the same months becoming the physical supplier propping up the countries that do depend on Hormuz, Japan, South Korea, India, and Europe, and in the process the US drew its own strategic reserve to a 43-year low.

Neither South Korea, which held about 79 million barrels of strategic inventory in 2025, nor Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, or India took any strategic drawdowns at all during the period, according to a mid-June analysis by MUFG. Japan released 80 million barrels starting March 16, about 15 days of Japan’s domestic demand, from a country where 94.2 percent of crude imports came from the Middle East going into the war. India’s official SPR was 21.4 million barrels as of March 2025, a figure dwarfed by India’s import volumes. Australia holds 29 to 36 days of fuel reserves and Australia released a large share to regional retailers.

Going into the second closure, China still has the room to do again what China did in the spring. The United States does not have the same room. The US reserve is thinner, the US commercial stocks are already below seasonal norms, and the US is still the country moving barrels through a strait that is now closing for the second time in four months.

THE TANK BOTTOM NOBODY TALKS ABOUT

The SPR is a political number. Cushing, Oklahoma is a mechanical one. Both are flashing red.

Cushing is the physical delivery point for West Texas Intermediate crude futures on the NYMEX. Cushing is where futures contracts settle. As of the week ending July 3, Cushing held 19.6 million barrels of crude oil. The 19.6 million barrel figure is the operational floor. Below roughly 18 to 20 million barrels, the remaining oil is sludge, sediment, water, paraffin, and unusable residue that cannot be pumped without damaging infrastructure. Pipelines lose pressure. Blending between crude grades stops. Outbound flows to refineries get curtailed or delayed. The NYMEX trades 700 million barrels of futures daily with 2.1 billion barrels in open interest. If Cushing goes below operational minimum and physical delivery fails, the price discovery mechanism for global crude oil seizes up.

The SPR at 319.5 million barrels tells you the emergency reserve is gone. Cushing at 19.6 million barrels tells you the commercial system is living paycheck-to-paycheck. There is no inventory cushion left to absorb a second disruption. Any refinery outage, pipeline problem, or hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico will cause immediate price spikes rather than smooth adjustments. JPMorgan warned that when OECD inventories hit operational minimums, price increases become exponential rather than linear. The projection was for May to June 2026. The world is now there.

THE COST OF THE FIRST SHOCK

The International Monetary Fund’s April 2026 World Economic Outlook laid out how close the spring shock came to tipping into a global recession. The IMF baseline forecast, assuming a relatively short war and oil averaging 82 dollars a barrel for the year, put global growth at 3.1 percent, already a cut of 0.2 percentage points from January. In a more adverse scenario with oil averaging closer to 100 dollars, the IMF put global growth at 2.5 percent. In the most severe scenario, oil and gas prices spiking 100 to 200 percent above January levels and staying elevated into 2027, the IMF put global growth at around 2 percent, a level the IMF called a close call for a global recession outright. Global growth has fallen below 2 percent only four times since 1980: the early 1980s recession, the 1991 slowdown, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2020 pandemic.

The human cost of the strait closure fell hardest on countries with no reserve to fall back on. On March 24, the Philippines declared a national energy emergency under Executive Order 110, with the country importing 98 percent of its oil from the Middle East and the Philippine supply cushion falling from 55 to 57 days of oil to 45 days in the first month of the war. Bangladesh and Pakistan faced severe fuel shortages. Sri Lanka introduced a four-day work week and saw long lines for petrol. India cut central excise duty on petrol and diesel by 10 rupees a liter on March 27 to hold down domestic pump prices, while raising export duties on diesel and jet fuel the same day to keep more fuel at home, a policy India began unwinding at the start of July as Gulf supply eased, before the strait shut down again. The International Energy Agency warned that disruption to fertilizer supply chains tied to the same Gulf shipping routes threatened to push up food prices in the world’s poorest countries well after the oil market itself stabilized the first time around.

Australia and New Zealand reveal what happens when a wealthy country has no domestic refining capacity and no strategic depth. Australia shut nearly all its refineries over the last decade. Over 90 percent of Australian petrol, diesel, and jet fuel is imported, mostly from Singapore, South Korea, and Malaysia, all of which rely on Middle Eastern crude. By late March 2026, more than 500 Australian service stations had empty pumps. The National Cabinet convened emergency sessions. Victoria and Tasmania made public transport free to reduce fuel demand. The Australian government slashed fuel excise by 50 percent and activated the National Fuel Security Plan at Level 2.

New Zealand is even more exposed. Since closing the Marsden Point refinery in 2022, New Zealand imports 100 percent of its petrol, diesel, and jet fuel. By March 2026, petrol hit 3.30 New Zealand dollars per liter nationally and exceeded 4 dollars on Waiheke Island. Diesel rose 90 cents per liter since the war started. The country had 52 days of total fuel cover, but less than 33 days of petrol. Panic buying emptied stations. The New Zealand government released six days of petroleum reserves and activated a four-phase Fuel Response Plan. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon called diesel the key pacing item, because New Zealand has no functional rail freight to fall back on. Every apple, every liter of milk, every piece of meat in the New Zealand supermarket arrived on a diesel truck.

Both countries turned to the United States for emergency supply. In April 2026, eleven tankers were en route from the US to Australia, most carrying diesel and petrol. Shipping costs for fuel tankers exploded from roughly 20,000 dollars per day to over 300,000 dollars per day. Some vessels took 40-day routes around Africa or through the Panama Canal at 8.5 million dollars more per voyage than the usual Asian supply route.

The US did not just sell oil. The US kept Australian trucks moving and New Zealand supermarkets stocked. If the US restricts refined product exports, which analysts predict a Trump administration will do as domestic inventories hit operational floors, those tankers vanish. Australia and New Zealand do not get outbid. Australia and New Zealand get excluded. The global market becomes a closed club, and the countries that closed their own refineries to save money discover they cannot buy their way back into the club.

The war also reshaped the Gulf’s own politics. The United Arab Emirates, hit by missile and drone attacks during the conflict and frustrated by OPEC quotas holding the UAE well below production capacity, announced on April 28 the UAE was leaving OPEC entirely, effective May 1. The UAE was OPEC’s third largest producer, with capacity near 4.85 million barrels a day against a quota of only 3.5 million. Wood Mackenzie called the departure the biggest schism in OPEC’s history since 1960.

THE RECOVERY THAT GOT INTERRUPTED

What makes the July escalation land differently is that the July strikes broke a real recovery, not a fragile ceasefire limping along. According to the International Energy Agency’s July Oil Market Report, global oil supply rebounded by 4.1 million barrels a day in June to 98.8 million barrels a day as Hormuz traffic resumed under the interim truce, though output was still 9.4 million barrels a day below pre-war levels. Gulf exports surged 6.5 million barrels a day in June to 16.1 million, still well short of the 24 million barrel pre-war average but a genuine rebound as tankers that had been stuck for months rushed to leave. North Sea Dated crude, the international benchmark the IEA tracks, fell to about 68 dollars a barrel by early July, the lowest since January and actually 2 dollars below where the benchmark stood before the war started. Global observed oil inventories rose in June for the first time in four months. The IEA had been forecasting the market tipping into surplus in 2027.

Then the July 7 and 8 attacks happened, and Dated crude jumped back to around 77 dollars a barrel, which is roughly where Brent sits now. The IEA itself has warned that the renewed fighting threatens to derail the shift toward surplus the IEA had been forecasting for next year. The market had mostly healed from the first shock by early July, and the July strikes are testing whether the healing holds or reverses.

On June 17, at the G7 summit in France, President Trump told reporters, “We run out of reserves at about four weeks. You know, there are reserves all over the world, and we would really run out, and there’ll be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it.” He called the scenario “bedlam.” He tied the warning directly to why he signed the memorandum of understanding with Iran the same week, saying the deal allows the ships to go. The White House declined to clarify whether Trump meant US reserves or global reserves. At the time, the SPR was at 340 million barrels. The SPR is now lower. The warning was about a scenario that got avoided by the June deal. The underlying number the warning was based on has gotten worse, not better, since Trump said it, right as the fighting the deal was supposed to end has restarted.

Oil was not the only pressure. Reporting at the time indicated the war had burned through roughly half the US stockpile of THAAD and Patriot missile interceptors in seven weeks of fighting, with warnings that continued combat could draw high-end interceptor stocks to dangerous levels within days. Reserves and munitions were both running thin on the same clock.

THE TWO PATHS AHEAD

The US is approaching a decision point that will reshape the global market regardless of what happens at Hormuz. With Cushing at operational minimum and the SPR at a 43-year low, the US cannot continue as the world’s supplier of last resort indefinitely.

Analysts including Peter Zeihan have outlined two likely paths for the Trump administration.

Path one is reimposing a crude oil export ban. The president has statutory authority to do so by executive decree, granted under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975. The effect would be to trap US light, sweet shale crude inside the country. But roughly 70 percent of US refinery capacity was built to process heavy, sour imported crude, the thick, high-sulfur oil from Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East. Running too much light crude damages legacy refineries and reduces the output of gasoline and diesel. Shale producers would face negative domestic prices as storage fills faster than producers can shut down production, triggering an industry implosion. Export infrastructure in Corpus Christi and the Houston Ship Channel would become stranded assets. The path would not lower US pump prices. The path would likely raise prices by crippling refinery output.

Path two is a tax on refined product exports, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, which the US currently exports at a higher volume than any country has ever exported crude. Congress has not granted the president explicit authority to ban refined exports outright. But an export tax achieves the same result without new legislation, and analysts have said the tax fits the administration’s stated preferences better than a blanket ban.

Either path would keep more fuel inside the United States and lower domestic prices. Either path would also remove the emergency supply that has been keeping Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Europe out of physical shortage rather than just high prices. The US hitting its own operational floor is not only an American story. The US hitting its own operational floor is the point at which the supplier propping up everyone else’s cushion decides whether to keep doing it.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE WORLD ECONOMY

The economic implications are not abstract. The IMF put global growth at 2 percent in the severe scenario, a level the IMF called a close call for recession. Recession is a word economists use. The physical reality behind the word is diesel trucks that stop moving, supermarkets that empty, and governments that face food riots before they face bond markets.

The Philippines went from 55 days of oil cover to 45 in the first month of the war and declared a national emergency. Australia saw more than 500 service stations run dry. New Zealand hit 33 days of petrol cover with no refinery to fall back on. Sri Lanka introduced a four-day work week. India cut fuel taxes and raised export duties in the same week to keep fuel from leaving the country. Those are not market adjustments. Those are economies hitting physical limits.

If the United States restricts refined product exports, the physical limits spread from the developing world to the developed world, because the emergency supply that has been keeping Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Europe moving gets trapped inside the United States. The world economy does not slow down in that scenario. Parts of it stop.

WHERE THIS IS ACTUALLY HEADED

Two separate conflicts, two separate trajectories.

On the Iran side, the track record is two ceasefires, both roughly three to four weeks, both broken by Iran testing control over the strait and the US retaliating. The core dispute, whether Iran gets to act as a toll authority over Hormuz, has never been resolved, only paused twice, which is why the same trigger caused the same collapse a second time within a month of the June deal. The US has burned through roughly half the high-end missile interceptor stock and is supplying the world’s oil market off a 43-year-low reserve, neither of which can absorb a long sustained reopening of full-scale conflict without real cost. Iran is operating under an unproven new leader who has not yet appeared in public, governing a state that just buried the Supreme Leader and lost a warship, a refinery, and command infrastructure to direct strikes. Both sides have real limits on how far they push the conflict, but neither side has resolved the actual issue that keeps blowing up the truce.

On the Lebanon side, there is no comparable pause to point to. The ceasefire signed June 21 has coexisted with a death toll in the thousands, an Israeli government that has stated plainly Israel does not intend to withdraw from occupied territory regardless of US pressure, and a prime minister making annexation claims that Lebanese villages themselves are denying. The Lebanon situation looks less like a truce cycling toward resolution than an occupation with a ceasefire label attached to it.

The oil numbers in this piece are downstream of both of those unresolved tracks, not a separate story. If the second Hormuz closure runs for months the way the first one did, the countries that spent the spring depending on American supply, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Europe, are about to find out what thin reserve means when the country holding the reserve decides to keep the reserve.

Copyright © Mark A. Shryock. May be shared with attribution.

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