Earnings for ships on the world's benchmark crude route approached $650,000 a day this week, with vessels hauling cargo from Saudi Arabia to China pulling in a record $647,000 on Thursday, more than ten times the rate a year earlier, according to Baltic Exchange data reported by Bloomberg. [1] The same week, Bloomberg separately reported that the flow of crude through the Strait of Hormuz is creeping higher, with regional producers moving an estimated 6 million to 8 million barrels a day, up from July's lows but still roughly half prewar levels. [2] Read together, the two numbers describe a market recovering in volume while still pricing the war's risk at historic highs.
This paper reported August 22 that ship traffic through the strait had risen 27 percent week-over-week even as both the United States and Iran insisted the waterway remained, respectively, fully open and effectively their own to license. That story's core finding was that a rising hull count did not settle whether the war's economic effects were easing or simply repricing. This week's numbers extend that finding rather than resolving it: more oil is moving, but the cost of moving it has kept climbing even as the volume has too.
The mechanics behind the flow increase are almost entirely regional. Saudi Arabia had its highest tanker count in weeks at Gulf export terminals on Tuesday, per satellite imagery Bloomberg gathered, and loading activity from Iraq's Gulf ports briefly exceeded prewar rates a day earlier. [2] Qatar and Kuwait, which together exported 2 million barrels a day before the war, have climbed back to roughly 70 percent of pre-conflict levels. [2] Every major regional supplier except Iran is now selling barrels for collection just outside Hormuz itself, using a shuttle system: smaller tankers haul crude to a rendezvous point outside the strait, where larger vessels waiting there, ones unwilling to transit Hormuz directly, collect the cargo for the onward journey. [2] Iran's own exports remain halted entirely under the US blockade reimposed when the ceasefire broke down. [2]
That shuttle system is precisely what is keeping charter rates elevated even as flows recover. Moving oil through Hormuz now effectively carries two separate shipping costs: a lump sum to get a vessel through the strait itself, and then a second, lower rate for the Oman-to-China leg once cargo is transferred outside the waterway. [1] TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanne said this week it costs roughly $20 million to move a cargo through Hormuz at all, and two tanker-market participants told Bloomberg that figure had risen further as the week went on. [1] The Oman-to-China leg alone now costs about $220,000 a day to charter, up from $131,000 a month ago. [1]
Much of the current rate spike traces to a single bet. Sinokor Group, the world's largest supertanker operator, began quietly hiring out ships at elevated rates late last week, market participants told Bloomberg, capping off a strategy the South Korean company, led by Ga-Hyun Chung, started before the war even began: buying dozens of tankers in anticipation of exactly this kind of disruption, then chartering them out once rates climbed. [1] Attacks on Saudi tankers by Yemen's Houthi rebels have compounded the squeeze, forcing some Saudi exports to redirect north through the Mediterranean or thousands of miles around Africa, adding roughly 30 days to the journey and pulling still more vessel capacity out of circulation. [1]
The two Bloomberg data sets, read side by side, undercut any simple recovery narrative. A rising transit count and rising regional export volumes look, in isolation, like a market normalizing. A charter rate ten times its level a year ago, still climbing as the week closed, is the same market's own verdict that the underlying risk, tankers sailing within range of a war that has already struck vessels this week, has not eased at all. The oil is moving. The price of moving it says the danger has not.
-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem