Hormuz Has Been Shut for Six Months. Why Didn’t Oil Hit $200?

Latest available reading for each indicator; figures redraw as new data publishes. Shipping data: IMF PortWatch. Refined products: US Energy Information Administration. Inflation: US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

1. The closure is real, and it is close to total

IMF PortWatch derives daily transit counts from AIS transponder data. It shows Hormuz traffic averaging 12.7 vessels a day between 22 February and Aug 2, 2026, against 90.2 a day over the twelve months before — a fall of 85.9%. Measured by cargo capacity rather than hull count the drop is 87.0%. Cumulatively, 12,547 vessel transits and 479 million deadweight tonnes of shipping capacity have not passed through.

One caution about AIS data in a war zone: crews switch transponders off. That biases the measured collapse to look deeper than the physical one, so treat 86% as an upper bound on the disruption. Two things argue it is close to right anyway. The collapse holds at between −83% and −87% against every reasonable baseline we tested, including calendar 2019, 2024 and 2025. And an entirely separate PortWatch layer agrees: container port calls at Jebel Ali, inside the Gulf, are down 87.6% on the same comparison.

2. The price went up, then came most of the way back

Brent averaged $68.88 in the three weeks before the closure. It peaked at $118.35 on Mar 31, 2026 — a rise of about 72%, painful but nowhere near the $150-$250 range that closure scenarios had assumed. It then fell back through the June ceasefire and was $87.95 at the latest reading (Aug 11, 2026), +27.7% above its pre-closure level.

That is the puzzle. Roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil stopped moving, and the barrel is +28% — not the multiple that a permanent loss of Gulf supply would imply. The rest of this article is the answer.

3. Four shock absorbers, two of which we can measure

Energy analysts credit four mechanisms with capping the price. They are not equally observable. Being explicit about which ones a dataset can and cannot see is part of the analysis, so the table marks each.

The first absorber is the one most commentary missed. “Closed” was never literal. Traffic bottomed at 5.3% of normal in March 2026, recovered to 26.4% during the June-July ceasefire — some 596 transits over 25 days — and has since fallen to 4.2%. A strait at 5% of capacity prices very differently from one at 0%, because the marginal cargo still clears.

The third absorber is the one that mattered most and that we can see least directly. China is the largest buyer of Gulf crude, and the case made by energy analysts is that it stopped buying without slowing down — drawing on the commercial stockpiles it spent the preceding years filling. WorldPulse cannot confirm the import cut: the Chinese import series it holds is value-based and has not updated since July 2025. What it can confirm is the second half of the claim. National Bureau of Statistics data show electricity consumption growing 5.3% year-over-year in Jun 2026 and the manufacturing PMI at 50.3 in Jun 2026 — an economy that did not contract while its oil purchases fell.

4. Inflation rose about a point and a half, and the Fed never moved

The transmission from oil to consumer prices was real but bounded. US inflation went from 2.66% in February 2026 to a peak of 4.27% in May 2026, and was back to 3.73% by Jun 2026. Eurostat data show France going from 1.10% to a 2.80% peak, Italy from 1.50% to 3.20%. These are meaningful moves, not a rerun of the 1970s.

Central banks treated it as such. The BIS policy-rate series has the US at 3.625% in January 2026 and 3.625% in Jul 2026 — unchanged across the entire shock. A widely made claim that policymakers nudged rates up in response does not survive contact with the data. They read the spike as a supply shock and sat still.

5. The pain did not disappear — it moved to the back end of the barrel

Here is the part of the shock that has not unwound. Comparing the most recent 30 days with the three weeks before the closure, EIA data show WTI crude +27.4% (to Aug 3, 2026). Every refined product is up more: US retail diesel +36.3% and retail gasoline +36.7%. Jet fuel, the most Gulf-exposed product of the three, is +58.6% — more than double the move in the barrel it is refined from.

The cleanest way to see this is the diesel crack spread — the refining margin, defined as the retail diesel price converted to a per-barrel basis (multiplied by 42 gallons) minus the crude price. It went from $92.45 a barrel in February 2026 to $142.66 at the latest reading (Aug 3, 2026), still +54% above where it started.

The timing is the point. Crude peaked at $114.58 on Apr 7, 2026 and has since fallen 28.5%. The refining margin did not follow it down: it reached $142.66 on Aug 3, 2026, the widest of the entire episode — 4 months after crude topped out. The barrel normalised. The thing that turns a barrel into diesel did not.

That is a diagnosis, not a curiosity. It says crude supply was never the binding constraint — refining and distillate supply were. Hormuz removed Gulf refined-product exports at the same moment that strikes on Russian refineries cut the other big source of diesel. Two of the world's largest distillate exporters were disabled at once. Releasing crude from strategic reserves does nothing about that, which is exactly why the pump price stayed high while the barrel price fell.

6. The Qatar hole: Asian gas repriced, and coal picked up the load

Hormuz is not only an oil chokepoint. Qatar supplies roughly a fifth of the world's liquefied natural gas and every cargo leaves through the strait. IMF commodity data show Asian LNG rising 94% between February and March 2026, against 58% for European gas. The Asia-Europe spread, which averaged $0.15 per MMBtu before the closure, has averaged $2.09 since. Asia normally trades near or below Europe; it now carries a standing premium. That is the signature of supply removed, not merely redirected.

With gas expensive, the substitute is coal — up 23.0% from February to the latest IMF reading (Jun 2026). The cheap-LNG window that was expected to displace Asian coal-fired generation closed instead. This is the clearest climate consequence of the episode so far, and it runs the wrong way.

The counter-example is instructive. US Henry Hub gas fell 26.0% over the same window. American gas is priced by a domestic pipeline network whose export capacity is fixed in the short run, so a war in the Gulf simply does not reach it at the margin. The same commodity, in the same month, can be a crisis in one hemisphere and a non-event in the other.

7. Why the second act is more dangerous than the first

The February shock met a world in unusually good shape to absorb it: full commercial tanks, Chinese stockpiles at their peak, strategic reserves untapped and a crude market that had been heading into surplus. Every one of those buffers is now thinner.

The shipping data already show the difference. Traffic through Hormuz since the ceasefire collapsed on 10 July has averaged 3.8 vessels a day, which is 4.2% of normal — below the March trough of 5.3%. The second closure is tighter than the first.

The price has begun to react. After bottoming at $79.36 on Aug 4, 2026, Brent has climbed +10.8% to $87.95 (Aug 11, 2026) — the market repricing a closure it had spent the early summer discounting.

A second front is also opening. Bab el-Mandeb, the Red Sea chokepoint that has run at a reduced but stable level since the 2023-24 Houthi campaign — the subject of our Red Sea detour analysis — began slipping again at the start of August 2026. It is too early to call a trend from a handful of days, and we flag it as a watch item rather than a finding. But a simultaneous squeeze on Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb would remove the Saudi east-west pipeline to the Red Sea as a relief valve, which is the single most important thing keeping any Gulf crude moving.