Hormuz now has flow receipts, but it still does not have a public rule.

The paper's June 2 account said Hormuz still had fees and threats but no public protocol. Its companion energy note warned that EIA source labels had to stay attached, especially when war talk was outrunning primary tables. Thursday's better record honors both cautions.

The Institute for Energy Research, summarizing what it describes as EIA's Global Energy Security Data, says first-quarter oil and petroleum liquids moving through the Strait of Hormuz fell to 14.6 million barrels a day, almost 30 percent below a year earlier. It also says traffic shifted toward Panama and Bab el-Mandeb routes as the Gulf risk rose. [1]

That is real evidence, if indirect. It is not the same thing as an Iranian passage protocol, a tariff schedule, an insurer circular, a carrier rule, or an official EIA page a reader can open and inspect. The direct EIA energy-security article, the EIA chokepoints page, and the weekly petroleum page all failed in the research stack with server errors or access failures, precisely when the data became politically useful. [2] [3] [4]

This is the divergence. X can turn a reduced-flow chart into proof of leverage. The mainstream energy page can turn it into a supply-chain story. The reader needs the missing bridge: who is allowed through, under what instruction, with what fee, inspection, escort, insurance, or risk premium.

Until that bridge appears, Hormuz is not normal. But neither is it reducible to slogans about closure. The public record says less crude moved through the strait, alternative routes mattered more, and the official operating rule remains absent from the file.

For markets, that absence matters more than the adjective attached to the day. A chokepoint with lower flows and no public protocol is not a settled passage regime. It is a spreadsheet trying to do the work of a rulebook.

-- HENDRIK VAN DER BERG, Brussels