Oil transit is rebounding — but fresh hurdles arrive

Oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz are resuming faster than many analysts predicted, but fresh hostilities in recent days are threatening the trend.

Why it matters: The rebound in shipments is good news for the tight oil market and is helping push prices lower.

The speed since the June 17 U.S.-Iran deal is just the latest example of the 2026 oil crisis repeatedly defying conventional wisdom over the last four months.

Oil prices climbed only slightly to start the week, with the global benchmark Brent crude at $72.51 this morning. That's basically where it was just before the war, suggesting traders don't see the recent flare-up as game-changing.

State of play: Traffic through the strait jumped last week, per multiple vessel tracking services, before pulling back after a container ship was struck Thursday.

The marine intelligence firm Windward reported that oil volumes leaving the strait reached 13.4 million barrels on June 24 and 11.7 million barrels on June 25.

Another metric: S&P Global Energy reported Thursday that 78 vessels — a tally that includes oil tankers, container ships and other types of cargo — transited the strait on June 24, by far the highest since the war started.

Yes, but: The situation is tenuous, with trading analytics firm Kpler and others showing a drop-off Friday and over the weekend.

The U.S. struck Iranian targets on Friday and Saturday in response to Iranian actions in recent days, including what U.S. officials called an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps drone strike on a commercial oil tanker.

The intrigue: Another factor that will influence how much oil flow resumes is how quickly Persian Gulf states revive production they dialed down when the strait was cut off.

The consultancy Rystad Energy, in a note Thursday, listed several reasons that supply from the region is recovering more quickly than it previously projected.

One is that producers are "reporting restart timelines ahead of earlier estimates."

Reality check: The recent surge of outbound tankers is only part of the equation. Watch how many empty ships enter the waterway to load, analysts caution.

"I wouldn't confuse a burst of outbound shipments with a return to normal," said Landon Derentz, senior director at the Atlantic Council's Global Energy Center.

"When ships are willing to enter the Gulf in normal numbers, that's a strong signal that governments, shipowners, insurers, and industry believe this fragile agreement has some staying power," he wrote via email.

ING analysts said in a note Friday that "once stranded vessels have moved out, we could see a pullback in flows."

What we're watching: The status of the strait is on the agenda when U.S. and Iranian officials meet tomorrow in Qatar, Axios' Barak Ravid reports.

The bottom line: Despite the recent — and fitful — surge, traffic remains well below the roughly 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products that moved daily through the strait before the war.

"It is still fairly obvious to us that until more vessels sustainably head into the Strait than come out of it, we won't get anywhere near a normal AG [Arabian Gulf] supply chain," Sparta Commodities' Neil Crosby said in a note Monday.