Tanker trackers mark Wright's record Hormuz day down to 9.14 million barrels

The counting is where the money sits. A cargo that clears Hormuz on a small hull, waits in the Arabian Sea, and is decanted into a larger tanker some days later produces one set of barrels and at least two defensible dates to book them against, and since the US pushed tankers onto a route hugging Oman, more of the traffic works this way ^[3]. Samir Madani of TankerTrackers.com says the Secretary's figure is what you get when transfers spread across several days are summed into one ^[4]. Put the two numbers side by side and the method is worth 7.86 million barrels: 17 million against 9.14 million means Wright's Monday runs 1.86 times the tracked one ^[17].

Take the trackers at their most generous. The seven-day average of 8.27 million barrels leaving the Arabian Sea ^[8], plus the 3 to 4 million a day Saudi Arabia now pushes through the Red Sea or the longer way via Suez ^[7], gives 11.3 to 12.3 million, which against a pre-war baseline of roughly 20 million including products ^[6] is 56 to 61 per cent ^[18]. Kpler had the region at about 65 per cent of pre-war in early August, with Fortune noting end-of-month volumes could have gone above 70 ^[10]. Wright's claim is that the number is above 100 ^[2]. The first three readings differ only by rounding; the fourth describes a different market entirely.

The defence is not empty. A White House official says the government and the military hold the best available data on products transiting the Arabian Gulf ^[11], and Fortune concedes that on Wright's own basis, products plus bypass pipelines, the arithmetic does clear pre-war ^[15]. The sharper version of that point is definitional: if Wright is counting products and pipelines while TankerTrackers counts oil out of the Arabian Sea including the Gulf of Oman bypass ^[5][6], the gap is partly a matter of what each side is measuring, and that is the way my read here is likeliest to be wrong.

What is not definitional is the volatility. Volumes fell to an estimated 6.81 million on 1 September and 4.63 million on 2 September as attacks resumed, so Wednesday moved barely half of Monday ^[9][19], and Madani's summary is that it is anything but steady ^[9]. The benchmark went above $95 on Wednesday from $87 a week earlier, about nine per cent ^[14][21], while the President was crediting the escorts, thirty ships a night, for prices not spiking ^[12].

What has actually held crude under $100, per the reporting: China is importing less and the US is exporting more, while the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been drawn to 44-year lows ^[13]. Two of those three are a stock being spent rather than a flow restored. A government that believes throughput is already above pre-war has correspondingly less reason to treat that reserve as a problem needing capital, which is the resource-allocation cost of scoring the Navy's escort mission on a number the trackers dispute. The seven-day average is 21 per cent above the 28-day ^[20], so the direction is genuinely up. The level is what is in dispute, and the level is what prices barrels.