Oil transit is rebounding — but fresh hurdles arrive

• The speed since the June 17 U.S.-Iran deal is just the latest example of the 2026 oil crisis repeatedly defying conventional wisdom over the last four months.
• Oil prices climbed only slightly to start the week, with the global benchmark Brent crude at $72.51 this morning. That's basically where it was just before the war, suggesting traders don't see the recent flare-up as game-changing.

State of play: Traffic through the strait jumped last week, per multiple vessel tracking services, before pulling back after a container ship was struck Thursday.

• The marine intelligence firm Windward reported that oil volumes leaving the strait reached 13.4 million barrels on June 24 and 11.7 million barrels on June 25.
• Another metric: S&P Global Energy reported Thursday that 78 vessels — a tally that includes oil tankers, container ships and other types of cargo — transited the strait on June 24, by far the highest since the war started.

Yes, but: The situation is tenuous, with trading analytics firm Kpler and others showing a drop-off Friday and over the weekend.

• The U.S. struck Iranian targets on Friday and Saturday in response to Iranian actions in recent days, including what U.S. officials called an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps drone strike on a commercial oil tanker.

The intrigue: Another factor that will influence how much oil flow resumes is how quickly Persian Gulf states revive production they dialed down when the strait was cut off.

• The consultancy Rystad Energy, in a note Thursday, listed several reasons that supply from the region is recovering more quickly than it previously projected.
• One is that producers are "reporting restart timelines ahead of earlier estimates."

Reality check: The recent surge of outbound tankers is only part of the equation. Watch how many empty ships enter the waterway to load, analysts caution.

• "I wouldn't confuse a burst of outbound shipments with a return to normal," said Landon Derentz, senior director at the Atlantic Council's Global Energy Center.

• "When ships are willing to enter the Gulf in normal numbers, that's a strong signal that governments, shipowners, insurers, and industry believe this fragile agreement has some staying power," he wrote via email.
• ING analysts said in a note Friday that "once stranded vessels have moved out, we could see a pullback in flows."

What we're watching: The status of the strait is on the agenda when U.S. and Iranian officials meet tomorrow in Qatar, Axios' Barak Ravid reports.

The bottom line: Despite the recent — and fitful — surge, traffic remains well below the roughly 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products that moved daily through the strait before the war.

• "It is still fairly obvious to us that until more vessels sustainably head into the Strait than come out of it, we won't get anywhere near a normal AG [Arabian Gulf] supply chain," Sparta Commodities' Neil Crosby said in a note Monday.

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