Iran has announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz following fresh US strikes on targets inside the country, warning that any vessel attempting to transit the strategic waterway would be targeted, according to Reuters.
Iran's top joint military command said the closure would apply to all vessels, including oil tankers and commercial ships. The announcement followed what Al Jazeera reported as a new round of US strikes on multiple targets in Iran.
The announcement comes after energy consultancy Rystad Energy warned that full normalisation of flows through the Strait of Hormuz was unlikely before January 2027.
The conflict has already erased around one billion barrels of cumulative crude supply from global markets in the three months since the first shots were fired, according to Aditya Saraswat, Middle East and North Africa research director at Rystad Energy. With 11.8 million barrels per day (bpd) shut in across six Gulf producers, Saraswat described the conflict as "the most severe supply disruption in the modern oil era".
Under Rystad's current base-case scenario, cumulative supply losses could reach nearly two billion barrels by the end of the year. "LNG transit has effectively disappeared, from around five vessels per day before the conflict to near zero, keeping Qatar and other Gulf LNG exporters fully exposed," Saraswat said. He added that crude oil and oil-product tanker traffic had also failed to recover, with the pre-conflict run rate of nearly 30 tankers per day reduced to only a handful on most days.
