Six months of closed Hormuz: four ships a day is the planning number, not the shock

Four transits a day is not a reduced service. It is a permission list. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps requires vessels to pass vetting and approval before transit is even considered ^[5], which means the clearing mechanism for the Gulf's main export corridor is no longer freight rates. A charterer can bid any number and still not sail. Budgets handle that badly: a price can be hedged and a probability can be insured, but there is no instrument that buys a place in a queue whose criteria are unpublished.

The arithmetic is worth doing precisely, because the headline figure is the generous version. Four against a pre-crisis 74 is 5.4% ^[1], not 6%. The gap is 70 sailings a day ^[2], and February 28 to August 22 is 175 days ^[3], so roughly 12,250 transits have not happened ^[4]. That tonnage was either rerouted or never lifted, and the hulls have been idle somewhere. Six months is long enough for that to be a fleet-positioning fact rather than a delay.

One caution on the same number: a transit count is not a volume. Hormuz normally carries about a fifth of world oil supply ^[3], but nothing in the traffic figure says what the four remaining ships were carrying, so barrels moved may sit above or below 6%.

What removes the option of routing around the problem is that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Iraq and Qatar all use the strait as their primary export corridor ^[9]. A buyer switching Gulf suppliers is switching within the same chokepoint. And the two authorities now disagree about who controls it. Tehran says the closure holds until Washington complies; the United States disputes Iran's account of total control and says limited passage continues under American naval oversight ^[6]. A shipowner reading both statements is being told to satisfy two permissions, neither of which guarantees the other.

The exit ramp on paper is the June 2026 memorandum of understanding, which was meant to ease tensions and restore commercial traffic and has produced little tangible movement ^[8]. Set against that, Mohsen Rezaei, appointed secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council on August 9 ^[10], has attached conditions that require the United States to end military operations against Iran and its regional allies, lift sanctions and the naval blockade, and withdraw its forces from the region ^[7], with no public indication from Washington that it intends to meet any of them ^[11].

That combination is what turns $94 Brent from an event into a level. The premium the source attributes to war risk ^[4] has now survived six months of negotiation theatre, which is long enough for term contracts, bunker budgets and hull war policies to be written at it rather than around it. Anyone building a 2027 plan should treat closure as the base case and reopening as the upside. The honest planning number in this story is not $94. It is four.