Gulf oil exports bounce back to pre-war levels despite Hormuz attacks

When the Strait of Hormuz closed in the opening days of the Iran war, the flow of crude oil from the Persian Gulf nearly stopped. Within ten days, non-Iranian exports from the region had collapsed by seventy-two percent—a shock that rippled through global energy markets and raised the specter of sustained supply disruption. But by late September, something unexpected had happened. The oil was moving again.

According to shipping data compiled by Kpler, a trade intelligence firm, Middle Eastern crude exports excluding Iran had climbed back above pre-war levels by the final week of September. On four separate days in that period, the region shipped between 19.5 million and 22.5 million barrels per day—surpassing the pre-war average of roughly eighteen million barrels daily. The recovery was neither inevitable nor simple. It required producers to fundamentally rethink how they moved their oil out of the Gulf.

The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman through which roughly one-third of the world's seaborne oil normally passes, had become too dangerous or too closed to rely on. So the major exporters—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq—began routing their crude through alternative channels. In September, about forty percent of Gulf crude left the region without ever crossing Hormuz, a dramatic shift from the seventeen percent that took such routes before the war. Saudi Arabia increased shipments through the Red Sea. The UAE pushed more oil through its pipeline to Fujairah, a port on the Gulf of Oman's western shore. These workarounds, combined with a surge in ship-to-ship transfers, allowed producers to maintain supply even as the primary chokepoint remained contested.

The scale of the tanker-switching operation was striking. In August, more than seventy percent of Gulf crude changed vessels while in the Gulf of Oman—a practice that was virtually nonexistent before the conflict. These transfers, conducted offshore in open water, allowed smaller tankers to collect crude from larger vessels and carry it onward, bypassing the need to navigate through Hormuz or its approaches. It was a logistical workaround born of necessity, a way to keep the oil moving when the direct route had become unreliable.

Yet the recovery was incomplete. Iran, the region's third major oil producer, remained largely sidelined. Iranian exports stayed well below pre-war levels, constrained not by the closure of Hormuz but by American sanctions policy, which had tightened in the months since the conflict began. While Saudi Arabia and the UAE had found ways to adapt and continue exporting, Iran had no such flexibility.

Meanwhile, the maritime threat that had prompted the initial scramble for alternatives had not disappeared. Attacks on vessels in and around the Strait of Hormuz continued through September and into October. On October 1, the tanker Kazimah III was struck by an unknown projectile, forcing the evacuation of its crew, though all personnel reached safety. At least seven such incidents had been reported in recent weeks. The attacks underscored a persistent reality: the region remained unstable, the chokepoint remained contested, and the alternative routes that had enabled the export recovery were themselves not entirely secure. The oil was flowing again, but the underlying tensions that had nearly shut it down had not been resolved.