✦ Private ClientThe Gold Decision Framework · Energy & inflation

The Strait Is Closed. The Oil Is Flowing.

Ship trackers show Hormuz almost empty. Goldman Sachs says Gulf exports are back at their 2025 average. The gap is dark tankers, and it moves the inflation problem from crude to diesel.

Written 30 September 2026 · day 213 of the Hormuz closure

✦ Member indicator: Hormuz Tracker. The numbers in this analysis, kept up to date: day of the closure, physical against paper Brent, the diesel crack and every new estimate of the flows.Open it →
Visible transits
1 a day
against ~85 normally (straits.live, AIS data, 20 Sep)
Estimated flows
10–16 mb/d
through the strait or out of the Gulf, depending on who counts (September)
US diesel at the pump
$6.38
per gallon, up $2.63 on a year ago; down 15 cents from the week before (EIA, 28 Sep)

Two numbers are doing the rounds, and they seem to contradict each other. Live ship-tracking dashboards show one commercial vessel a day passing the Strait of Hormuz. Goldman Sachs says Persian Gulf oil exports doubled in September and are back at their 2025 average. Both can be true, though not quite the way the headlines suggest. For every tanker the trackers see, seven to nine probably sail with their transponders off. How far the flows have really recovered is open to debate; where the inflation problem has moved to is not.

What the screen shows

Dashboards like straits.live read AIS, the radio transponder every large ship is supposed to broadcast, combined with IMF PortWatch transit data. On that screen the strait has been closed since 28 February: one commercial transit on 20 September against a normal 85 or so, 252 ships stranded, war-risk insurance at 40 times its normal rate and about $10 million to insure a single VLCC passage.

A rough ratio puts that in perspective. If 10 to 13 million barrels a day really pass the strait, as JP Morgan and TotalEnergies estimate, that takes seven to ten tankers a day at a normal mix of ship sizes. The AIS screen shows one. Kpler, which adds satellite imagery, counted about three a day in mid-September. So roughly 85 to 90% of the traffic is invisible to a public dashboard, and more than half is missed even by satellite tracking.

Read those dashboards with care. On 29 September straits.live headlined Brent at $106.12 from data that was 13 hours old; after the Goldman note the same morning, Brent traded near $103. PortWatch transit counts also arrive with a delay of several days.

What the barrels say

Goldman Sachs puts Middle East crude exports at 15 to 16 million barrels a day in September, which it calls the 2025 average. Before the war they ran at 22 to 24 million; the March low was 5 to 6 million. Saudi Arabia is above its 2025 average. Iran shipped no crude by sea at all in September.

The oil moves in three ways the transponder screen cannot see:

22–24
Pre-war · Persian Gulf exports, mb/d
5–6
March 2026 low · the worst of the closure
15–16
September 2026 · back at the 2025 average, mostly out of sight
1%
Visible transits · share of normal ship traffic on AIS dashboards
Update · 30 September, 16:20

JPMorgan now puts Middle East crude exports at about 17.5 million barrels a day, 98% of pre-war levels, with 40% of September exports bypassing the strait through pipelines, other ports and ship-to-ship transfers. Refined products are the gap: diesel, gasoline and jet fuel exports are still around half of normal. The crude shortage is largely over; the fuel shortage is not.

Every tracker counts something else

TankerTrackers, which specialises in dark-fleet tankers using satellite imagery and AIS, counts crude through the strait only: 16.63 million barrels a day before the war, 3.45 million in the first phase of the conflict and 2.72 million under the first US blockade. Goldman's figure covers all Persian Gulf exports, so the two baselines differ. TankerTrackers had 1,469 tankers in its dark-fleet register in February. Other estimates now put the global shadow fleet above 1,500 vessels. The fleet built to move sanctioned Iranian, Russian and Venezuelan oil (Iran to China alone ran at 1.64 million barrels a day) now carries Gulf barrels too.

Be sceptical of any single figure. Dark flows are, by definition, hard to verify, and the estimates for September run from 10 to more than 23 million barrels a day depending on who counts and what they include:

10
TotalEnergies CEO · average exports through Hormuz itself
~13
JP Morgan · exports via Hormuz, back to late-June highs
15–16
Goldman Sachs · Middle East crude exports, including dark cargoes
17
US Treasury Secretary Bessent · Gulf exports, “sometimes”
17.5
JP Morgan · all Gulf oil flows, including pipelines that bypass the strait
23.3
Goldman Sachs · total Persian Gulf oil outflows, as reported by OilPrice.com

Part of the gap is definitions: crude only or crude plus fuels, through the strait or including the Saudi and UAE pipelines that bypass it. Part is method: counting tracked ships or modelling the ones that are not seen. The market itself gives a reality check. Physical Brent well above futures, steep backwardation and record diesel margins are not what normal supply looks like. The truth for the strait itself is probably nearer the low end of the range than the high end.

One more gap worth knowing: the physical and the paper price. The U.S. EIA's physical Brent spot price was $127.84 on 16 September and $114.89 on the 22nd, while Brent futures traded around $100 to $105. A gap of $10 to $20 between oil you can load today and oil on a screen is a measure of how tight physical supply still is.

The bottleneck moved to the refinery

Goldman's key line: more dark flows can limit the upside in crude even if the disruption lasts longer, while refined products and European gas hold more upside. Crack spreads, what a refiner earns turning crude into fuel, already show it.

Diesel crack peak
$108/bbl
ULSD futures, intraday 3 Sep; diesel margins at a record
3-2-1 crack
$66.69
EIA spot, 15 Sep; August the highest month since 2006
US refinery runs
98%
vs a 90.7% five-year average; October maintenance ahead

Russian refining capacity is down about a quarter after drone strikes, and Russia banned fuel exports from 8 July. The Saudi Jazan refinery was hit again in early September. US gasoline stocks are 11.8 million barrels below their five-year average. Hedge funds held a combined 177 million barrel net long in gasoline and diesel futures on 1 September.

Washington is now weighing a ban on US diesel exports, which would make things worse rather than better. S&P Global modelled that a full ban would force US refiners to cut crude runs by about 1.9 million barrels a day, some 12% of US throughput, because there would be nowhere to store the surplus. A refinery cannot cut runs that much and keep making the same gasoline and jet fuel. The US is the world's largest diesel exporter, and Europe is one of its main buyers.

Europe, meanwhile, is holding back. It joined the IEA's record emergency release from March, but according to IEA chief Fatih Birol a third of those barrels had not yet reached the market and 80% of total reserves remain untouched. A further release is “not the number one agenda”, even as he calls Europe “one of the most exposed regions” for diesel going into winter.

Washington is doing the opposite. On 29 September it offered another 40 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, as a loan that companies repay with interest, the last tranche of its 172 million barrel share of the coordinated release. That takes the reserve to its lowest level since 1982, with gasoline above $4 and diesel above $6 a gallon, less than two months before the midterm elections. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright did not hide his frustration: “Several European member countries have released only a fraction of the crude oil and petroleum products they pledged.”

That leaves an open question. Why would Europe, the region the IEA calls most exposed, keep its stocks in the tank while the US drains its own? A cautious winter plan is the obvious answer. A less comfortable one is that governments want those barrels on hand for a wider conflict with Russia. Nobody has said so, and it remains the author’s speculation. But the gap between what Europe pledged and what it released is a fact, and one worth watching.

A trader’s view of the charts

The two cracks are telling different stories. The gasoline crack (RBOB against WTI) has formed a clear head-and-shoulders top, helped along by the switch to cheaper winter-grade gasoline in September. Gasoline margins are peaking, as they usually do after summer.

The diesel crack (heating oil futures × 42 minus WTI) has not broken. It completed an AB = CD pattern with two legs of about $56: from roughly $30 in January to $86 in March, and from $54 in June to $110–112 in mid-September. Since then it has pulled back into a converging triangle between a horizontal neckline near $92 and a falling line from the September highs, holding above the Ichimoku cloud. That points to sideways to slightly lower consolidation rather than a collapse. The Chikou span meets price in the first days of October, a natural decision point. A decision on the US export ban is the kind of headline that breaks a triangle like this.

Follow the diesel and gasoline cracks on the live indicator page →

Brent is the wrong inflation gauge right now. Watch the diesel crack. If cracks fall while crude stays high, the supply squeeze is easing. If cracks stay high while crude falls, inflation pressure is still in the pipeline.

What it means for gold and silver

Crude can fall on headlines about dark flows or talks, as it did this morning, while diesel and gasoline stay near records. Diesel moves freight, and freight moves almost everything else. That is the channel through which the energy shock keeps inflation sticky: this morning France’s harmonised inflation jumped to 3.4%, and German state figures rose to between 2.9% and 3.3%. Europe runs far more on diesel than the US, so the pressure lands hardest on the ECB.

For gold the effect cuts two ways. Sticky fuel inflation keeps central banks leaning hawkish, which lifts real yields and weighs on gold in the short term. But it also deepens the stagflation squeeze on indebted states such as France, and strengthens the longer-term case for gold as a hedge against the policy choice that follows: fight inflation, or protect the debt.

Sources

Figures are as reported at the time of writing and move quickly. Chart readings are the author’s own. Educational content to support your own research and decisions. Not financial advice.

← Back to Insights