A growing number of ships are escaping the Strait of Hormuz using a risky route close to Oman’s coastline that shipping executives have warned could result in a collision.
About 15 ships per day are going in and out via the Omani route, protected by US air cover, according to two people with knowledge of the transits, who said most of them were oil tankers. Two more confirmed the practice of using the route with US assistance.
US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday on his Truth Social platform that “Last month, I directed our Great U.S. Military to execute a secret mission to support Oil Tankers and other Commercial Ships through the Strait of Hormuz”.
He said the effort had allowed about 200 commercial ships to cross the strait and that 100mn barrels of crude were able to reach global markets as a result of the operation.
Dan Smoot, chief executive of Vantor, which tracks ships by satellite imaging, said at the WSJ CEO Council summit in London on Wednesday that there was a “tremendous amount” of shipping activity through the Strait of Hormuz that was “outside the news right now”.
Still, oil transport companies remained nervous about the risks for such transits.
“It is a very narrow waterway and there is not much room for manoeuvre, so we are worried about the navigational implications of ships using it,” said John Stawpert, marine director at the International Chamber of Shipping.
Analysts have suggested most of the ships travelling through the strait are leaving it, but others are still entering to trade non-Iranian crude. They said that the growing number of “dark transits”, in which ships pass through the strait without their GPS signal on to avoid detection by Iranian forces, was helping to cushion oil prices below $100 per barrel.
The closure of Hormuz has cut off about 12mn barrels a day of oil from the market, the equivalent of roughly six supertankers daily.
Energy Aspects, a consultancy, estimated that Iraq, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates were currently shipping about 3mn barrels of crude a day through the strait.
It noted that stocks in Mina al-Ahmadi in Kuwait fell sharply at the end of May, by nearly 8mn barrels, suggesting that more ships were being loaded. Amrita Sen, founder of Energy Aspects, said the dark transits meant the world’s refineries could increase production and avoid “summer tightness, in theory”.
Shipping executives, however, have been quick to underline that even if traffic has picked up, it remains far below the 135 ships per day that travelled through the strait before the conflict.
“We are not getting anywhere near shifting the volume of cargo we used to have through there,” said one tanker industry executive.
The US first established a system of providing air cover to ships attempting to pass the strait via the Omani route some two weeks ago, according to three people with knowledge of the transits.
Vessels wanting to pass through the waterway are instructed to request permission from US Central Command, which then provides the coordinates of the Omani route and issues instructions for ships to turn off their GPS signalling systems and all electronics. Vessels were also advised to transit under cover of darkness, two of the people said.
“We are talking a single-lane route with two-way traffic on it with loaded ships who do not have the manoeuvrability, like driving down a country lane at night without your lights on,” said the tanker executive. “We will most likely have an accident.”
The route, which hugs the rocky Omani coastline, can be as narrow as 800 metres wide at some points, making it a navigational challenge for large ships. Two-way traffic had been permitted by the US, which had instructed vessels to pass at wider points, one person said.
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A US Apache helicopter that had been involved in the effort was hit by an Iranian drone on Monday, according to US officials. The attack prompted a volley of retaliatory strikes from the US on Wednesday.
Centcom described the strikes as a “proportional response to recent attacks on US forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters”.
Despite the ongoing firing from both sides, the slight increase in traffic on the Omani route has allowed more oil cargoes to leave the Gulf.
There has been a rise in ship-to-ship transfers — where cargo is moved directly from one vessel to another while at sea — in the Gulf of Oman in recent weeks.
The FT identified four such meetings of ships from a radar image taken by a European Space Agency satellite on June 2 around the anchorage off Fujairah, 80 miles east of the Strait. In the same area of sea a month earlier, there were none.
Optical satellite imagery from the ESA analysed by the FT from June 6 shows at least nine vessels engaging in ship-to-ship transfers off Sohar.
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Tankers were repeatedly shuttling between Gulf loading terminals and transfer points outside the strait, Kpler said, based on analysis of satellite imagery and market data. This accounted for 80 per cent of all non-Iranian oil trade out of the Gulf, it added.
Shipping executives say this is most likely a pattern of less risk-averse vessels doing short voyages through Hormuz from oil terminals to more conservative vessels anchored off the Omani port of Sohar.
In the first nine days of June, almost 2mn b/d were exported from the Gulf using this method — almost twice as much as transited in May.
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The main route through the Strait of Hormuz is believed by shipowners to be mined by Iran, pushing traffic to go south via Oman or north via a route in Iranian territorial waters.
According to data from the maritime analytics firm Windward, traffic inbound and outbound through the northern corridor amounted to 51 ships in the first week of June — a substantial rise compared with May, when an average of 35 ships crossed per week. Ships passing via this route require sign-off from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The US has sought to blockade Iran’s own oil from leaving on ships since mid-April.
About 500 merchant vessels remain stuck in the Gulf, according to the latest estimates from ICS and other industry bodies. This is below the original 800 that had been thought to be stuck there when war broke out, as some vessels have left the area and more accurate data has been compiled.
Additional reporting by Abigail Hauslohner in Washington
