Why Is the Strait of Hormuz Important? Oil, Gas and Who Depends on It

About 20 million barrels a day in 2024, counting crude oil, condensate and refined fuels. Saudi Arabia was the largest single shipper, with about 5.5 million barrels a day of crude, or 38 percent of the crude passing through. Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Iran shipped most of the rest.

The flow had been fairly steady for years. Crude and condensate shipments fell by about 1.6 million barrels a day between 2022 and 2024, partly offset by half a million barrels a day more of refined products, and the total in early 2025 was roughly level with 2024. The geography explains why so much is squeezed through one place: at its narrowest the strait is 21 nautical miles wide, and its two shipping lanes are only two miles each, as we set out in How Wide Is the Strait of Hormuz?

Because Qatar, one of the world’s largest exporters of liquefied natural gas, has no other way to ship it. About a fifth of global LNG trade passed through the strait in 2024, most of it from Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex, which ships close to 80 million tonnes a year in normal times.

The war hit that trade twice. QatarEnergy halted LNG production on March 2, 2026, after attacks on Ras Laffan, and declared force majeure to buyers on March 4. Iranian missiles struck the complex again on March 18 and 19, damaging two production trains, and the company’s chief executive said about 17 percent of Qatar’s export capacity had been knocked out. QatarEnergy has extended the force majeure month by month, most recently in late September. The emir told the Shura Council on October 13 that state revenue fell 42 percent in the first half of 2026, as we report in Qatar’s LNG crisis.

Fertilizer is the overlooked cargo. Gulf producers, led by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, supply between about a quarter and a third of the world’s urea exports, depending on how trade is measured. In April 2026, urea exports from the economies that depend on the strait fell 83 percent by volume, and fertilizer prices rose worldwide as a result.

Asia. In 2024, 84 percent of the crude oil and condensate and 83 percent of the LNG that crossed the strait went to Asian buyers. China, India, Japan and South Korea alone took 69 percent of the crude.

The United States depends on it far less directly. About half a million barrels a day of Gulf crude reached the United States through the strait in 2024, around 7 percent of US crude imports and 2 percent of US oil consumption. US crude imports from the Gulf were at their lowest in nearly 40 years. But oil is priced on a world market, so a closure raises fuel costs in America as well as in Asia.

On the exporting side, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain have no export pipeline that avoids the strait at all. For them, and for most of Iraq’s oil, the strait is the only way to reach customers.

Only a small part of it. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline runs from its eastern oil fields to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, with a nominal capacity of 5 million barrels a day that was temporarily raised to 7 million in 2019. The UAE’s pipeline from Habshan to Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman, can carry about 1.8 million barrels a day. Because both lines already carry oil in normal times, only about 2.6 million barrels a day of spare capacity was available to bypass the strait, against roughly 20 million that used it. Iran’s own Goreh-Jask line, built for about 300,000 barrels a day, had stopped loading by late 2024.

The 2026 war put the Saudi line to the test. By late March it was running at its full 7 million barrels a day, with about 5 million exported from Yanbu and the rest feeding Saudi refineries. That made the East-West pipeline a target: on October 26 the Houthis claimed drone strikes on its pumping stations, a claim Riyadh and Saudi Aramco have not confirmed.

Oil prices jump, governments open their emergency stocks and the Gulf’s own economies lose their main income, as the 2026 closure has shown. Ship crossings fell from 85.5 a day in 2025 to about 3.5 a day from October 1 to 25, 2026, the figures behind our report on how many ships pass through the strait daily.

On March 11, the 32 member countries of the International Energy Agency agreed to make 400 million barrels of emergency oil stocks available, the largest coordinated release in the agency’s history and more than double the 182.7 million barrels released in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. By October 2 about 325 million barrels of it had been released, as we examine in our analysis of the G7 oil release. Even that could not replace what the closed strait used to carry. In October the agency’s executive director, Fatih Birol, said Middle Eastern crude exports had recovered significantly but flows of refined products such as diesel remained severely constrained.

About 20 million barrels of oil a day passed through the Strait of Hormuz in 2024, roughly a fifth of world consumption. More than a quarter of all seaborne oil trade used the strait in 2024. About a fifth of the world’s LNG trade, mostly from Qatar, crossed it in 2024. Asian buyers took 84 percent of the crude and 83 percent of the LNG. Saudi and UAE pipelines offered only about 2.6 million barrels a day of spare capacity to bypass it. Brent crude was about $71 a barrel the day before the war began on February 28, 2026, and settled near $94.60 on November 4, 2026. In October 2026 three or four ships a day crossed the strait, against 85.5 a day in 2025.