Oil continues to leave the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz despite the severe disruption of normal commercial traffic, with Gulf producers increasingly relying on tankers that reduce or disable electronic tracking during the most dangerous part of the journey.
Bloomberg reported that vessels carrying oil from the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Qatar and Kuwait have been crossing the strait with their Automatic Identification System signals switched off before transferring cargoes to other tankers in the Gulf of Oman. People familiar with the trade told the news agency that actual flows through Hormuz are running above the roughly four million barrels a day visible to much of the market, although the nature of the operation makes an exact figure difficult to establish.
The scale matters because Hormuz was one of the central arteries of the global energy system before the war. Around 20 million barrels of oil passed through the waterway each day in 2024, according to the US Energy Information Administration, representing more than a quarter of global seaborne oil trade and roughly a fifth of worldwide petroleum consumption.
That traffic has fallen sharply since the conflict that began with US and Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28. The International Energy Agency said this month that Hormuz had effectively closed again in early July, while regional oil exports, including those using routes that bypass the strait, fell to about 15 million barrels a day. Loadings briefly reached 20 million barrels a day early in July before dropping to around 12 million later in the month.
The continuing flow of oil helps explain why the disruption has not produced the sustained price shock initially feared. Brent crude climbed above $120 a barrel during an earlier phase of the crisis, but by August 17 it was trading at roughly $89, still carrying a substantial geopolitical premium but well below the war's highs.
Hidden tanker movements are only part of that adjustment. Gulf producers have also pushed more oil through pipelines that avoid Hormuz, while inventories and weaker consumption have reduced pressure on the physical market. Before the conflict, the EIA estimated that Saudi Arabia and the UAE together had roughly 2.6 million barrels a day of unused pipeline capacity capable of bypassing the strait.
Demand itself is now responding to the disruption. In its August outlook, the IEA forecast that global oil consumption will decline by 1.6 million barrels a day in 2026, citing the prolonged closure of Hormuz and elevated fuel prices among the factors weighing on use. At the same time, millions of barrels of Gulf production remain offline, leaving the apparent stability in crude prices dependent on a fragile balance between reduced supply and reduced demand.
Keeping those barrels moving has come at a considerable cost. The International Maritime Organization had recorded 65 confirmed maritime incidents across Hormuz and the wider Middle East by August 11, with 17 confirmed seafarer deaths. The incidents range from damaged tankers and cargo vessels to ships that have been abandoned or sunk.
ADNOC said on August 7 that 15 of its vessels had been attacked by missiles or drones since the conflict began, killing one crew member and injuring 20. The company subsequently confirmed another attack on August 8, two more on August 13 and a further incident on August 14, all without additional injuries.
Bloomberg subsequently reported a higher total of 23 attacked ADNOC vessels. That figure may reflect more recent information supplied to the news agency, but it has not yet been fully reconciled with the company's publicly itemised operational updates.
The continued willingness of producers, tanker operators and insurers to accept those risks has prevented a complete break in Gulf exports. It has also created a shipping system that is harder for traders to observe, making conventional vessel-tracking data a less reliable measure of how much crude is actually reaching the open market.
The emergence of untracked voyages does not mean the economic threat from Hormuz has disappeared. It shows instead how quickly the energy trade has adapted to a waterway that can no longer be treated as routinely accessible.
Pipelines, offshore transfers, inventories and reduced demand can soften the consequences of disruption, but none can easily replace the volumes that once crossed Hormuz under normal conditions. The widening gap between visible shipping data and actual movements also adds a new layer of uncertainty to a market already shaped by military risk, insurance costs and volatile diplomacy.
For now, enough crude appears to be finding a way out of the Gulf to prevent the most extreme price scenarios from materialising. That resilience should not be mistaken for a return to normality. The global oil market has instead settled into an improvised wartime system in which substantial volumes continue to move, but through routes and practices that carry far greater operational and political risk.