Only a Dozen Commodity Ships Cleared Hormuz This Weekend While Saudi Oil Still Leaves Port

The world's most important oil chokepoint has gone eerily quiet, and yet Saudi crude keeps sliding out to sea.

About a dozen commodity ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz this weekend, down from 35 the weekend before, OilPrice reported. That tally counts only vessels sailing with their transponders on, so the real number could run higher, since many captains now go dark to slip through the waterway unseen.

The slide has been building for days. Kpler counted just four tankers passing last Thursday against a 10-day average of 16, and only 13 very large crude carriers exited the strait in the week to 13 September. Iran's squeeze on the channel is tightening.

Then comes the figure that refuses to fit. In a Friday note, JP Morgan called Middle East oil flows surprisingly strong and singled out Saudi Arabia as the standout, estimating the kingdom shipped about 2.9 million barrels a day through Hormuz over the previous six days. The weekend ship count and the bank's flow number do not describe the same waterway.

What reconciles them is a workaround. Saudi Arabia pipes crude to its Ras Tanurah port on the Persian Gulf, loads it onto small vessels bound for the Gulf of Oman, then transfers it ship-to-ship onto larger tankers, a shuttle that keeps barrels moving even as headline traffic thins.

The other exit is under fire. Yanbu, on the Red Sea, had become Saudi Arabia's main outlet after the earlier Hormuz freeze, but Houthi strikes this weekend hit Riyadh and Yanbu again, squeezing a port already strained by the East-West pipeline outage and the halt of late-September cargoes to Europe.