Damstrait · compiled 2026-07-16 · refreshed …

Oil & the Two Wars

What the Russia–Ukraine war and the 2026 US/Israel–Iran war cost the world — in fuel, heat, fertiliser, food, water and power, not only in barrels. Every figure links to its source; hover any chart for as-of dates and provenance.

observed (traces to a primary data series) · third-party estimate (provider named) · scenario / forecast

Freshness, judged against each source's own publishing cadence — not the calendar: latest print nothing newer has been published — monthly and slower series also name when the next one lands · next print due the publisher owes one · unrefreshed a newer reading should exist and we have not taken it · structural a closed window that does not age

Thesis: the barrel is only the fifth-worst-hit price in this war — heat, fertiliser and the pump came first, and the poor paid in queues

Two wars, one closed strait, and a bill the world is still paying in units that are not barrels. Three months of a shut Hormuz took 12.4 mb/d off the market and sent Brent from $71 to $138 — but because every pipeline out of the Gulf was built for crude, oil had a partial escape valve and the things behind the same strait with no pipeline out did not: Asian LNG, nitrogen fertiliser, European gas and the American pump all peaked further above their pre-war level than crude did. Nor did the cost land evenly. Only a quarter to a third of the world's road fuel sees a market price at all; the rest cleared through rationing, four-day weeks and idle factories in countries that produce no oil and set no prices. What follows is that bill — what it cost, who paid it, and the machine that did it; every part of them opens the tab that proves it.

$71 → $138 → $92: Brent & WTI through the war (USD/bbl)

So what — two legs, and no round trip — the first spike broke on the expectation of reopening rather than on barrels arriving; the second began when that expectation died. Brent has not been back to its pre-war level on any day since February.

FRED daily spot (DCOILBRENTEU / DCOILWTICO), refreshed 2026-07-24; the series lags a few business days (last print Jul 27, $91.82). Shaded bands = war phases; numbered markers = the events tabulated on the Prices & futures tab, with the second leg's arithmetic.

What it cost — and the barrel is not the worst of it

Every price the strait sets, indexed to its own February — ranked by how far it went

So what — crude is not where the shock landed hardest — one axis, one base: each row is that price divided by its own pre-war February level, so a barrel, a tonne of urea and a gallon at an American pump are finally comparable. The report's own subject ranks in the middle of its own board.

Methodology & caveats (why these are comparable, and where they are not)

Every row is a monthly average indexed to its own February 2026 value, computed here from the same fragments the detail tabs draw — never re-keyed. Mixing cadences inside an index manufactures divergence, so the pump row is averaged from EIA weekly retail to monthly rather than quoted at its weekly peak ($4.50 on 11 May), and Brent is the IMF monthly average rather than the daily spot the price chart above uses — which is why Brent peaks at … here and at $138.21 there. June is the last month every series prints; the pump has since printed July, shown on the row as a trailing note and excluded from the ranking. Fuels are IMF Primary Commodity Prices via FRED (Asian LNG and European gas are the free proxies for JKM and TTF, not the assessed markers); fertiliser and the food index are World Bank Pink Sheet and FAO. Each row's own basis is in its hovercard, and the monthly paths behind these endpoints are on the fuel-divergence chart and the urea arc. This is a ranking of price: it says nothing about how much of each is bought, which is the next panel's question.

Asia's four big buyers: fewer barrels, bigger bill (April 2026)

So what — the shortage was not a discount — the crude that did arrive cost so much more that landing a quarter fewer barrels still cost more money. This is the strait converted into cash: observed volumes on one side, the observed Dubai price on the other.

Table view (volumes, prices and the daily bill, per buyer)

Buyer	Pre-war mb/d	April mb/d	Barrels	Pre-war $mn/day	April $mn/day	Bill

Methodology & caveats (why Dubai, why April, and what the baseline assumes)

Priced on Dubai, not Brent. These are Asian sour barrels; they price off Dubai and the Gulf official selling prices set against it. The two benchmarks came apart in exactly this window — Dubai ran $23.60 above Brent in March and $12.00 below it in April (the differentials), so pricing April on Brent would overstate the bill by more than a tenth. The series is FRED POILDUBUSDM, the monthly average behind that same spread, and the merger asserts each price leg reconstructs as Brent + the published spread. April, because it is the only month all four buyers are measured in — the same rule the inflow panel follows, and the merger asserts the two panels use identical volumes. The one counterfactual is the pre-war leg: each buyer's own pre-war volume valued at the February Dubai average — the same barrels at the price before the war. The April leg is observed on both sides. Volume bases differ by buyer (China customs tonnage, Japan a ministry return, Korea a 2025 average, India a press print) and each row's hovercard names its own; Korea's pre-war volume is a 2025 average, so its pre-war bill is the least precise of the four. This is crude only — it excludes the LNG, LPG and products these same buyers import through the same strait, so it is a floor on what the strait cost them.

Who absorbed it — the same shortage, three lived experiences

So what — the market cleared on poverty, not on price — only 25–30% of global gasoline and gasoil demand sees full market pass-through (IEA). The other two-thirds never got a price signal: it adjusted through subsidy budgets, FX crises, rationing decrees and queues.

Red = rationed by decree or absence, amber = industry shut on margin, green = merely trimmed by price. Each tile states its own basis and links its sources.

The machine that did it

Everything above is the effect. The board below is the mechanism — the three gates that produced it, at one scale of barrels a day, each element opening the tab that proves it. It is the whole supply argument in one view; if you only want the consequences, they are the two panels above and the Lifelines tab.

The world oil machine, as it runs today ribbon widths ∝ mb/d · as of …

Swipe the board sideways to follow each lane to its destination.

The pricePrices

The spike broke on the expectation of reopening — Brent fell 21% before the truce was even signed. It repriced to the $90s when the truce died.

The pumpPrices

The buffersReserves

US SPR · …… Mb · …-yr low

Endurance, round 2~13 mo · was 19.5

The largest-ever IEA release bought four months; the SPR gave up … Mb from its … Mb February level. Round two starts with the cushion two-thirds gone — same shock, bigger price.

The forkScenarios

The dot is today — Red Sea impaired, the fifth state on the ribbon above. The market prices 14% odds the disruption persists; the strip sits $8 over the official forecast.

Moving / still supplied Not moving / not supplied Route closed Gate — a strait or a sanctions wall widths ∝ mb/d, one scale throughout — the same encoding as the corridor explorer

The full thesis, with every link

The Russia–Ukraine war is a grinding attrition campaign that reroutes and degrades supply without removing much crude from the market: four years of sanctions, price caps, and ~194 drone strikes on refineries in H1 2026 alone have hollowed out Russian refining (~a third offline per trackers; Kyiv claims more) and forced Russia to export more crude, not less. The 2026 US/Israel–Iran war did what sanctions never could: the Strait of Hormuz closure (de facto Feb 28, declared Mar 2–4, until Jun 17; ~20 mb/d of total oil transit incl. products cut to a trickle — plus 19–20% of world LNG, a third of world helium, roughly a third of traded urea and the light ends behind Asia's crackers, none of which has a pipeline out: the bypass ledger) was, per the IEA, the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market — world supply fell from 106.9 to 94.5 mb/d in three months, Brent went from $71 to $138, and the largest-ever coordinated stock release could replace barely a sixth of the lost barrels. Prices broke on the expectation of reopening: Brent fell 21% in the two weeks before the June 17 memorandum was signed (Jun 3 $101.69 → Jun 17 $80.33), then a further 13% after — the market priced the deal before the signatures. That truce collapsed on July 8, with the buffers that cushioned round one now substantially depleted.

Seven syntheses

The barrel is not where the shock landed. Asian LNG, nitrogen fertiliser, European gas and the American pump all peaked further above February than crude did — because the pipelines were built for crude and nothing else had a way out. See what had no route out
The market cleared on poverty, not on price. Only 25–30% of world gasoline and gasoil sees full pass-through (IEA); the rest cleared through rationing decrees, four-day weeks and idle crackers — the deepest cuts in countries that pump nothing. See where the loss actually landed
The bill with the longest fuse is fertiliser. Urea doubled and came back below where it started; the shock moved to phosphate, which peaked in June and is still +25% over February — and fertiliser is priced against planting calendars, so this one is paid at the Oct 2026–2027 harvests. See the fertiliser → food transmission
Chokepoints beat sanctions. Four years of Russia sanctions moved prices less than four weeks of Hormuz closure — scarcity even put Urals at a premium to Brent (CREA / S&P, Apr–May). See how Dubai and WTI dislocated
Reserves are a bridge, not a fix. The largest-ever IEA collective action covered the resulting stock draw for ~4 months; the bill is an SPR at a 43-year low as hostilities resume. See the drawdown and what refills it
The buffer that got the policy was already the deep one. Oil holds 396 days of OECD cover; Bahrain's stated water reserve is four — and Gulf desalination is gas-fired, so the same shock is its input cost. See the Lifelines tab
The market prices persistence; forecasts price peace. The Aug 5 strip sits ≈$8 over EIA's base case — one-in-seven odds of persistence against Goldman's $115 severe case. See the probability arithmetic

The full arguments — and three more that did not make the seven

The barrel is not where the shock landed. On a common base — each price against its own February 2026 monthly average — crude ranks fifth. Asian LNG peaked at 194, nitrogen fertiliser at 182, European gas at 158 and the US pump at 154 (monthly; 155 on the weekly print), against Brent's 149. The retracements rank the same way and for the same reason: Brent has given back 56% of its war premium and Asian LNG only 36%, because a barrel had a partial escape valve and a cargo of LNG had none. The control that proves the mechanism is US Henry Hub — chemically the same molecule as the LNG at the top of the board, on the far side of an ocean — which fell to 85 and ended June at 102. This was a shipping-lane shock, and the further a thing was from a pipeline, the more it cost.
The market cleared on poverty, not on price. The IEA's 2026 demand downgrade is −1.0 mb/d, the first drop since 2020, and the realized second quarter was −4.8 mb/d y/y. Almost none of that was a consumer responding to a price: only 25–30% of global gasoline and gasoil demand sees full market pass-through, so the rest adjusted through subsidy budgets, FX crises, decrees and queues. What that looked like: a four-day week in Pakistan (schools shut two weeks, fuel allowances cut 50%), QR-coded rationing at 25 litres a week in Sri Lanka, one LPG cylinder per 25 days in India, a four-day week in the Philippines — while US drivers trimmed 3% and Japanese and Korean crackers quietly took 290 kb/d each off the market on margin. Around half the entire demand loss is invisible by construction: it is factories switching off on a spreadsheet (the waterfall). "Demand destruction" is the euphemism; the distribution is the finding.
The bill with the longest fuse is fertiliser. Urea went $472/t in February to $857 at the April peak — India's record 2.5 Mt tender cleared at $935 — and then to $400 by July as China reopened export quotas and SABIC opened a Yanbu route — 15% below where it started. Every one of those reliefs is fragile, and the shock did not end so much as move: phosphate kept climbing after nitrogen turned, peaked in June, and is still +25% (DAP) and +34% (TSP) against February. For sixteen months the ore under it did not move at all — phosphate rock is an administered contract quote and it sat at $152.5 through the entire doubling, which located the pressure in energy and freight rather than in the mine. That is now changing: rock has ticked up two months running to $170, +11% off its administered level, so the next phosphate move need not borrow anything from the oil price. Hormuz carries 32–36% of world urea trade (CRU puts it near 40% including Iran); QAFCO's 5.6 Mt/yr plant — 14% of traded urea — shut on 4 March and Iran idled all seven of its complexes. Fertiliser is bought against planting calendars, not spot needs, so the transmission lands later than the headline: India's rabi top-dressing (Nov–Jan), Brazil's September window (~30% covered) and East Africa's next planting. The IMF's template puts a 10% fertiliser rise at ~7% on cereal prices after one quarter. So far this is an affordability squeeze, not a food crisis — FAO's index is 130 against 160 at the 2022 peak — and the thing to watch for is a 2022-style export-ban cascade, which in 2026 has so far appeared only in inputs.
Chokepoints beat sanctions. Four years of Russia sanctions moved prices less than four weeks of Hormuz closure. The 2026 shock even suspended the sanctions architecture in practice: Urals traded at a $7–8 premium to Brent in April–May (vs the EU's $44.10 cap), the US waived restrictions on India's purchases, and Russian March export revenue nearly doubled to ~$19bn. Scarcity trumps enforcement whenever both bind at once.
Reserves are a bridge, not a fix. The largest-ever IEA collective action (400 Mb, ~1.2–2.1 mb/d deliverable) faced a 12.8–14.4 mb/d Gulf supply loss; Brent rose 17% in the days after the announcement (press figure; FRED-computable: +14.9% over three sessions). What broke the spike was the prospect of reopening, not the barrels — two-thirds of the June collapse (−21%) came in the two weeks before the memorandum was signed. The releases did their real job — covering the realized stock draw for ~4 months — but the cost is visible now: SPR at a 43-year low, OECD government stocks at a 35-year low, just as hostilities resume.
The buffer that got the policy was already the deep one. The OECD entered this war with about 13 months of oil cover — 396 days — and the institutional apparatus to defend it: an SPR, an IEA collective-action mechanism, coordination across thirty-odd countries. The states doing the fighting hold their drinking water on a different clock entirely. Bahrain publishes a four-day reserve, Abu Dhabi four, Saudi Arabia five to six, and the UAE plans on two days of normal consumption; Qatar's own figures disagree by an order of magnitude and it has not reconciled them. There is no IEA for water. The coupling makes it worse rather than better: roughly three-quarters of GCC desalination is cogeneration bolted to a gas-fired power plant, so the LNG premium on the fuel-divergence chart is the marginal cost of Gulf municipal water. This war also shot at that fleet — nine documented strikes on water infrastructure, four in Kuwait, plus the first confirmed kinetic attack on a hyperscale cloud provider. On 17 July an attack on a water plant closed Brent 4.6% higher, which is the whole argument in one print (the Lifelines tab).
The market prices persistence; official forecasts price peace. The futures curve never panicked at the back (Dec-27 held near $78 even with cash at $106+, and is $71.47 today) and the front has now come to meet it: the Aug 5 strip is $79.06 Oct / $76.14 Dec, ≈$8 above EIA's post-truce Q4 base of $70.00 — half the ≈$11 gap of Jul 16. Read as a two-state mixture against Goldman's $115 severe case, that gap implies roughly a one-in-seven market-implied probability that the disruption persists (the arithmetic). Scenario bounds: ~$40 durable peace, $115–150+ severe escalation.
The barrel's quality mix broke before its quantity did. What Hormuz locked in was overwhelmingly medium/heavy sour (Basrah, Kuwait Export, Arab Medium/Heavy, Upper Zakum — the bypass pipelines carry only lighter grades); what replaced it was light sweet (record US/Brazil/Guyana output) plus sour SPR barrels. Result: the Dubai benchmark "effectively broke," Urals' discount collapsed to $2–3 — and products were tighter than crude everywhere, because refining was hit on both fronts (Russia by drones, the Gulf and Iran by missiles). The deeper reason products ran tighter is that the pipelines were built for crude: 23–37% of Hormuz crude had a paper route out, and events showed 21–30% deliverable, while the Gulf's entire light-ends bypass is one 300 kb/d NGL line the IEA calls "fully utilised" (every cargo, ranked).
Substitution did not balance the market — and it currently runs backwards. The rationing and the idle crackers above are what balanced it (Jul OMR: 2026 demand −1.0 mb/d, the first drop since 2020) — while war-priced LNG (TTF +32%, JKM +45% y/y) is currently pushing demand toward oil (realized gas-to-oil switching ~0.1–0.3 mb/d, author estimate; the oft-quoted ~1 mb/d is Energy Intelligence's Sep-2022 ceiling) and coal, not away. Durable displacement (~1.7 mb/d avoided via EVs) is structural and mostly pre-dates the wars; the cheap-LNG-displaces-oil thesis is deferred to 2027–28 and hostage to Hormuz and Ras Laffan's 3–5-year repair.
Recovery time is set by politics, not engineering. The repair hierarchy is consistent: export terminals recover in days-to-weeks, refineries in weeks-to-months (open-ended under Ukraine's 2–3-week re-strike cadence and parts sanctions), LNG trains in years (Ras Laffan: 3–5). But the single biggest variable — Hormuz transit — has no engineering timeline at all; both sides deliberately spared Kharg Island's export plumbing, keeping the off-ramp intact. The binding constraint on world oil supply in H2 2026 is a negotiation, not a repair schedule.

What to watch — which case is materializing?

Green zone = recovery-case readings, amber = in between, red = risk-case; thresholds are author-set, and each tile links its source. Where a public series is already on this page the tile draws its recent path through the zones (Brent daily, SPR and Cushing weekly); otherwise a level line marks the latest print. Colour is the market, not the clock. How current each reading is rides a separate monochrome channel on the source line — latest print, next print due, unrefreshed — judged against each source's own cadence, so a monthly figure three weeks old is current while a daily one is not.

Where this goes

The fork: the base case (EIA, de-escalation-conditioned) glides back toward $70 and the deferred glut once the risk premium unwinds; the risk case (scenario A) sends winter product markets into a depleted buffer — ~13 months of endurance now vs ~19.5 in February, so the same shock produces a bigger price response. All four futures are quantified on the Scenarios tab, including a 24-month chapter-by-chapter timeline; the watch panel above tracks which is materializing.

H2 2026–2027: the market vs the forecasters (Brent, USD/bbl)

So what — the market disagrees — the official forecast is conditioned on the war ending; the strip is not, and the gap between them is the price of that disagreement.

The ≈$11 strip-vs-EIA gap is the market's persistence pricing; bounds are analyst quotes (Goldman severe $115; Fink $40 / $150+). The gray dashed vintages — $58 (Feb) and $96 (Apr, the day of the peak) — are regime-chasing, not conservative.

Methodology & caveats (paths, vintages)

Actuals: FRED daily. EIA path: STEO July 7 vintage quarterly midpoints ($74.03 Q3 / $70.00 Q4 / $67.63 Q1-27 / $61.97 Q4-27) — assumes de-escalation, pre-dates the July 8 collapse. Strip: Barchart settlements Jul 16 (Dec-27 point is a May 15 vintage). Each STEO vintage extrapolated the regime it was published in — too low before the war, too high at the peak, and, if the strip's +$11 is right, too low again now. The full five-vintage history is keyed, with a source per vintage, in the chart data.

Prices & futures in 2026

Brent entered 2026 in the $60s under a projected 2–4 mb/d surplus, with the curve in contango. The Feb 28 war and Mar 2–4 Hormuz closure produced the largest monthly price rise on record (March +45.5% on monthly averages, +64% intra-month per FRED; press accounts cite +51%), a $138.21 peak (Apr 7), and a violent flip to backwardation ($27.23 cash-to-Dec-27 on May 15). Anticipation of the June 17 Islamabad Memorandum collapsed prices — Brent fell 21% in the two weeks before signing, reaching $70.16 (Jun 26), briefly below pre-war — before the July 8 truce breakdown put Brent back to $83.69 (Jul 14, FRED) — and then the second leg ran. The sanctions-waiver revocation took effect Jul 17, Trump floated seizing Kharg Island and reimposing the naval blockade, and Brent added 15.5% in three sessions — the sharpest three-day move since the March shut-ins — to peak at $105.32 on Jul 23, before easing to $91.82 (Jul 27). That is +34% from the Jul 2 trough, FRED to FRED — every figure in this paragraph observed, none of it press-quoted. Goldman warns of $120+ if disruption persists.

$71 → $138 → $92: Brent & WTI through the war (USD/bbl)

Table view (monthly averages)

Month	Brent avg	Brent range	WTI avg

FRED daily spot (DCOILBRENTEU / DCOILWTICO), refreshed 2026-07-24; the series lags a few business days (last print Jul 27, $91.82). The second leg peaked at $105.32 on Jul 23 before giving back $13.50. Shaded bands = war phases; numbered markers are keyed in the event table below.

Key price-moving events

The # column matches the numbered markers on the chart above (the Jul 17–22 row post-dates the marker set and carries no number). Computed reactions use FRED closes: last close before the event date → first close on/after (1d) and third close (3d); z-scores are vs pre-war (Nov 2025–Feb 2026) daily volatility.

Date (2026)	Event	Brent reaction (FRED daily)
Feb 28	US–Israel launch "Operation Epic Fury"; Khamenei killed	$71.32 Feb 27 close (~$72.5 intraday pre-strike, press)
Mar 2–4	IRGC closes Strait of Hormuz; ~20 mb/d transit → near zero	$77.24 → $95.74 (Mar 6)
Mar 10–12	Gulf shut-ins reach 10+ mb/d	breaks $100 (Mar 12)
Mar 11	IEA announces largest-ever release (400 Mb)	+14.9% over 3 sessions despite the release (press: +17%, CNBC)
Mar 27–31	IRGC bans vessels to/from US/Israeli-allied ports	$121.47 → $126.69; March +45.5% m/m (avg basis)
Apr 4–7	USS Charlotte sinks Iranian frigate Dena	peak $138.21 (Apr 7)
Apr 13	Islamabad talks fail; US naval blockade ordered	re-firms off $98.63 trough (Apr 17)
May 4–26	US Navy escorts; selective transit resumes	$118 → $92.88 (May 29)
Jun 17	Islamabad Memorandum — war/blockade formally ended	$80.33 at signing (−21% since Jun 3, anticipatory) → $70.16 (Jun 26)
Jul 8	Iran strikes ships; US strikes Iran; oil-sanctions waiver revoked eff. Jul 17	+6.6% (FRED daily, $71.78→$76.50); Sep futures $76.48
Jul 13–16	Hormuz attacks; blockade reinstated Jul 15; Kharg seizure floated	$81.62 (Jul 13) → $83.69 (Jul 14); eased to $81.23 (Jul 16). ~$84.6 Jul 16 (front month, press)
Jul 17–27	Sanctions-waiver revocation takes effect (Jul 17); Trump threatens Kharg seizure & renewed blockade; Goldman warns $120+	$85.01 (Jul 17) → peak $105.32 (Jul 23) → $91.82 (Jul 27), all FRED

Suspicious trading flagged around market-moving posts — per the Senate record (Warnock release May 27, 2026; Senate Banking letter to the CFTC): $580m of bearish Brent/WTI futures by a single trader ~15 minutes before a Mar 23 ceasefire-postponement post; ~$950m hours before the Apr 7 ceasefire announcement; >$700m on May 6 ahead of an Axios report. (A "$750m Apr 17" item circulates via Wikipedia only — not in the Senate record; unconfirmed.)

Benchmarks inverted: differentials to Brent, monthly ($/bbl)

So what — quality broke first — the barrels were still being produced; what failed was which grade could reach which refinery, and both benchmarks priced that before any volume was lost.

Table view (monthly differentials)

Month	Dubai − Brent	WTI − Brent

Both inversions in one picture — quality and geography broke before quantity did. Dubai's March +$23.6 came with the benchmark itself breaking: Upper Zakum, Al Shaheen and Fateh dropped out as deliverable grades and price discovery migrated to Murban futures. WTI–Brent hit a daily extreme of −$25.94 on Apr 8 as Atlantic light sweet was pulled East. Both are FRED monthly series. A third line, Urals−Brent, was withdrawn on 2026-08-02: it was never a continuous series, only sparse third-party assessments, and the last publishable one is Reuters, 9 June — a chart that cannot be kept current is worse than no chart. The Urals story it carried is stated where it is sourced: the April–May premium over Brent that overran the EU's $44.10 cap, and the grade-mix discussion.

Futures curve, positioning, volatility

The back of the curve never panicked: Dec-27 held near $78.5 with cash at $105.76 on May 15 — the curve priced a temporary-but-slow shock throughout, on OPEC+ spare (stranded behind the strait) and 2027 non-OPEC additions.
Strip snapshot (Aug 5): Oct-26 $79.06, Dec-26 $76.14, Dec-27 $71.47 — an orderly backwardation, and ≈$8 above EIA's base case. The market still prices persistence that official forecasts exclude, but roughly half of what it priced on Jul 16, when the same two-contract gap was ≈$11. Sep-26 (CBU26) expired on Jul 31, so Q3-26 is now realized rather than priced and both live contracts sit in Q4.
The risk is priced through oil vol specifically: OVX climbed 40.3 (Jul 6) → 68.97 (Jul 23, FRED OVXCLS) through the second leg while VIX was still just 18.7 — with CFTC managed money ~+124k contracts net long even at the June trough.

Market-implied probability the disruption persists

Scenario modeling: two-state risk-neutral mixture, p = (futures − EIA base) / (severe − EIA base). Assumes exactly two outcomes, risk-neutral pricing, and no variance premium — a calibration device, not a forecast. Sensitivity across severe anchors $105 (Goldman-adjacent) to $150 (Fink bound) shown as columns. Anchors: EIA STEO Jul 7 base; futures are the Aug 5 ICE settles, keyed per contract from two aggregators that agree within $0.06. The relationship has now inverted: the strip used to lag the spot series, and today it leads it — FRED's daily Brent has printed nothing since Jul 27. Against that curve, spot peaked at $105.32 (Jul 23), $26 above the front contract, and last closed at $91.82, still $13 above it.

The implied price/supply curve: what each lost mb/d cost — 2026 vs history’s supply shocks

So what — the price of a barrel not there — and the curve is steeper going up than coming down: the same shortfall costs more while it is worsening than while it is healing.

Israel–Iran war — Mar to Jun 2026 · Brent monthly avg ($/bbl) vs IEA world total-liquids shortfall vs Feb 2026 baseline

Table view (monthly observations + fit)

Month (2026)	World supply (mb/d)	Shortfall vs Feb (mb/d)	Brent avg ($/bbl)	Phase

What it actually cost at the pump ($/gallon, US retail regular)

So what — crude stopped explaining it — the pump does not trail crude: week to week the two move together, and they troughed in the same week. What they did instead is come apart. About half of a crude move reaches the pump inside the week, and since late April the pump has held a widening margin above anything crude alone accounts for.

Table view (weekly pump price, the crude-implied line, and the gap)

Week	Pump ($/gal)	Implied by crude ($/gal)	Gap (¢)	Brent ($/bbl)

Methodology & caveats (a withdrawn claim, and what the wedge is not)

Correction, 2026-08-03. This card first published a 34-day lag: Brent peaked 7 Apr, the pump 11 May, so the pump was said to run about five weeks behind, and pass-through was estimated peak-to-peak on that basis at 99% of full. Both are withdrawn. The two series troughed in the same week, and the cross-correlation of their weekly changes is largest at lag zero (r = 0.74), collapsing by one week (r = 0.39). There is no multi-week lag. The peak-to-peak figure went with it, because pairing a daily crude peak with a weekly pump peak 34 days later silently assumed the lag it was then used to describe. The peaks differ because the two paths diverged from late April, not because one trails the other.

Pass-through is now the slope of weekly pump changes on contemporaneous weekly Brent changes: 1.32¢/gal per $1/bbl (95% CI 0.93 to 1.71, r² = 0.55, n = 38) against the 2.38¢ of the 42-gallon arithmetic. That is a short-run figure — roughly half a crude move lands inside the week. Cumulative pass-through over months can be larger and is not estimated here, which is why this panel no longer claims to validate the SPR card’s full-pass-through assumption: that release ran for months, and this is a weekly slope.

What the wedge is not. This panel cannot separate refining margin from tax, retail margin or grade mix, so the 69¢ is an observation and not an attribution. It is consistent with this report’s finding that products ran tighter than crude because refining was hit on both fronts (the refining ratchet), but it does not establish it. GASREGW is a national average across grades and formulations; state and grade spreads are far wider than the moves drawn here. Brent is averaged to the same Monday weeks GASREGW is surveyed on — that alignment is what makes “same week” meaningful rather than an accident of which day each series is stamped, and it makes this crude line smoother than the daily spot elsewhere on this tab.

What the SPR did to pump prices — and what refilling it will do (¢/gallon, US retail gasoline)

So what — asymmetric by design — a release is fast and lands on a high price; a refill is slow and lands on a low one, so putting the barrels back moves the pump far less than taking them out did. That asymmetry is the case for holding a reserve — and the reason the bill for using one is deferred rather than avoided.

Table view (rates, price bases, and effects)

Scenario	Rate (mb/d)	Δ Brent, mid ($/bbl)	Pump effect (¢/gal, lo–hi)	Price basis

H2 2026 forecasts (as-of dates noted; the analyst rows pre-date the July re-escalation, and even the Jul 16 strip pre-dates its second leg, Jul 17–22)

The full analyst grid is drawn on the Overview tab's fan chart (EIA path, futures strip, and Goldman/Morgan Stanley quarterly dots against the actual price path); the numbers are in the table below.

Table view (analyst forecast grid)

Source (as-of)	Q3 2026	Q4 2026	FY 2026	FY 2027
EIA STEO (Jul 7)	$74.03	$70.00	$81.91	$64.76
Goldman Sachs (early Jul)	$82	$80 base / $115 severe	~$85	—
Morgan Stanley (Jun 30)	$82	$78	—	—
World Bank (Apr CMO / Jun GEP 2026)	—	—	$86	$70
Futures strip (Aug 5)	—	Oct $79.06 · Dec $76.14	—	Dec-27 $71.47

Raw data: the FRED Brent (DCOILBRENTEU) and FRED WTI (DCOILWTICO) daily series and FRED Dubai monthly, 2026-07-24 vintage.

Supply & infrastructure — the strikes are the cause, the lost barrels the effect

World liquids fell 106.9 → 94.5 mb/d (Feb→May, the largest drop ever recorded), then rebounded to 98.8 as Hormuz reopened; shut-ins peaked at 11.2 mb/d. The chokepoint itself has no repair timeline: both sides spared the export plumbing until late 2025, when Ukraine broke the pattern.

World total liquids supply: 2026 by month, and scenario paths into 2027 (mb/d)

So what — the rebound was permission, not repair 106.9 → 94.5 → 98.8 mb/d: the largest drop ever recorded, and the rebound rode the reopening

Table view (observed months + scenario paths)

Month (2026)	World supply (mb/d)	m/m	Status
Jan	106.5	−0.4	historical
Feb	106.9	+0.4	historical
Mar	97.0	−9.9 (largest ever)	estimate
Apr	95.1	−1.9	estimate
May	94.5	−0.6 (trough)	estimate
Jun	98.8	+4.3	preliminary

Scenario path (author, from Jun 98.8)	Aug 2026	Dec 2026	Jun 2027	Anchor

IEA total liquids, monthly; scenario paths (author scenario model — toggles above) are author scenarios branching from the last published month, colored by the scenario ladder. Price consequences of each branch are quantified on the Scenarios tab.

Methodology & caveats (baselines, path construction)

IEA total liquids = crude + condensate + NGLs + processing gains + biofuels. m/m deltas computed from the level column; IEA's own quoted deltas (−10.1 Mar, +4.1 Jun) come from different vintages. Press "9.4 mb/d below pre-war" for June uses a different baseline — vs Feb 106.9 the gap is 8.1. 2026 forecast average 102.6 mb/d (−3.7 y/y); 2027 rebound to 110.3 contingent on de-escalation. EIA's quarterly equivalents: Q1 103.86 → Q2 95.26 → Q3f 101.29 → Q4f 107.14. Paths branch from Jun 98.8; the shared July dip to ~97.5 is an author estimate for the Jul 15 blockade reinstatement (IEA hasn't published July). The two war-expands paths take their levels straight from the closure-scenario supply panel: Feb baseline minus the headline shut-in (A: 106.9 − 9.5 = 97.4; B: 106.9 − 15.5 = 91.4, below the May trough), using the round-1 calibration that shut-in maps ~1:1 to measured world shortfall (June: 8.3 shut in, 8.1 measured). The recovery path rides the demonstrated June ramp (+4.3 m/m) but stays ~1 mb/d under EIA's Q4 base until war damage repairs; frozen conflict is May-style escorted transit.

Where the 12.4 mb/d went: February → May trough, by producer (mb/d)

So what — the offset was a seventh Five Gulf producers lost >1 mb/d each; record light-sweet output offset barely a seventh of it

Producers losing >1 mb/d get their own bar (largest first); smaller losses are grouped; all gains are one offsets bar. Bases are mixed by necessity — monthly crude surveys where they exist, EIA quarterly averages or total liquids where not (hover a bar for its basis and source) — so a residual bar absorbs Russia's drone-strike decline plus the basis mismatch. Estimates, not a published decomposition. Where's China? Absent here because it has no bar to draw: the world's #5 producer (~5.5 mb/d liquids) sat this out on the supply side — output was flat (5.58 → 5.52 Q1→Q2, EIA) and nothing Chinese was shut in. Its war role is on the buyer's side, where its April cut is the largest bar of the mirror waterfall directly below; it is also carried as a deliberately flat row in the movers chart, against which the Gulf collapses read for what they are (China-buffer panel; demand section).

…and who stopped receiving them: February → April, by buyer (mb/d)

The same missing barrels as the bars above, counted on the buyer's side — never add the two charts. April is the only month all four buyers are measured, so it is the only single-month decomposition that sums; China's own trough came later and deeper (June, nothing back since). Four buyers only: Europe took ~4% of pre-war Hormuz crude exports but no citable monthly volume exists, so this understates the demand-side cut rather than measures all of it. Severity as a share of each buyer's own inflow — where Japan, not China, leads — is the dumbbell below; how China bridged the gap is the China-buffer panel.

What was hit, how big, and for how long — capacity offline, a waterfall on the calendar

So what — nothing has net healed Nothing has net healed: the war era ends at its own high-water mark, 7.9 mb/d still offline — every Russian export terminal came back, not one Russian refinery did

Every outage window is two steps: up when the capacity goes off, down (hollow) when it comes back, so the track is mb/d affected and still offline at that instant — the number the old row-per-asset timeline made you estimate from area. Solid = physical damage; hatched = undamaged but blocked or precautionarily shut; lighter = partial, and each partial's figure declares in its hovercard whether it is sourced or an author estimate. Read the two panels against each other: round one is spikes that retrace and ends at less than half its peak; the war panel ends at its peak. That is the repair clock — every Russian export terminal struck since February is back, and not one Russian refinery is. Two eras on one toggle because a single Jun-2025→Aug-2026 axis spent 58% of its width on the stretch holding 30% of the outage-days; the y-scales differ too (round one never exceeds 1.9), so the war panel carries round one's peak as a dashed line. Hormuz is excluded from the total and rides its own strip — at ~11 mb/d it is 6× the largest damaged asset and would flatten every step below it.

Methodology & caveats (units, partials, omissions)

Gas converted to ~mboe/d at 5.8 mcf/boe so the steps add. Partial windows carry an explicit per-window offline figure rather than a blanket multiplier, because "partial" means different things across the table: for Mina al-Ahmadi and Kstovo the capacity quoted is already the damaged units, while for Ryazan (Aug-2025) and CPC it is the whole asset. Where a source quantifies the partial it is used (CPC "−30–40%" → 0.53; Ryazan "~half of capacity" → 0.17); where none does, the convention is half the asset — the same author estimate the ratchet note applies to Volgograd. Every figure and its basis is in the hovercard and in data/manual/infra_outages.csv. Same-day pairs are drawn restoration-first, so an asset switching between windows (Kharg on Jun 14 and Jul 15) is never counted twice for an instant. Windows dated "approx." are keyed from qualitative reporting ("weeks", "days"). Single-unit, weeks-scale Gulf hits (SAMREF, Riyadh, Ju'aymah, Manifa/Khurais, UAE/Oman/Iraq) and diffusely-dated Russian units (Perm, Novokuibyshevsk, Syzran, Yaroslavl) are omitted, so the track is a floor — see the master table below (each highlighted asset links to its primary source). Per-asset durations, which the earlier row-per-asset version showed directly, live in that table and in each step's hovercard.

Refining offline worldwide: two wars, two signatures (mb/d of capacity)

So what — the bigger theater is the Gulf 6.0 mb/d of refining capacity is off across the two wars, and 3.5 of it is in the Gulf against 2.5 in Russia — the larger theater is the one the ratchet below does not cover, and the two have opposite shapes

How to read it: height is nameplate capacity offline, not lost runs — a dark refinery subtracts throughput at roughly its utilisation, and world runs bottomed near 77 mb/d in April on a different basis. The two shapes are the finding. Russia never recovers — every step is still down, because Ukraine re-strikes faster than repairs land, which is what the ratchet below decomposes. The Gulf does: Ras Tanura came back in 24 days and Bazan Haifa in two weeks, so its line falls twice. Jazan (Jul 25) is expected back ~Aug 15 on a consultancy estimate Aramco has never confirmed. Russia's line sits above the ratchet's ~2.0 because it also carries Volgograd's partial and Ukraine's Kremenchuk, off since 2022.

By country (capacity offline at the latest window, mb/d)

Country	mb/d offline	Theater

Iran's own 1.8 mb/d system is the single largest entry and has been down since 28 February — larger than any national total on the Russian side. Windows and per-asset sources are in the inventory below.

The Russian refining ratchet — a waterfall on the calendar (named sustained outages, mb/d)

So what — six of the seven fell in nine weeks Seven named refineries, ~2.0 mb/d, still down — six of them knocked out in the nine weeks after May 5

Only the named, still-ongoing outages (all seven re-verified mid-July 2026) — a floor, not the tracker total. The steps accelerate visibly: one outage added Nov 2025–Apr 2026, then six in the nine weeks after May 5 — the re-hit-during-repairs cycle described below.

Methodology & caveats (exclusions, reference lines)

Volgograd's recurrent partial halts and single-unit damage at Perm, Novokuibyshevsk, Syzran, Yaroslavl and others aren't cleanly dateable and are excluded; assuming roughly half of Volgograd's ~0.3 mb/d capacity is out (author estimate), adding it puts the named floor (~2.0) near the ~2.14 mb/d tracker figure — a consistency check, not independent corroboration. Reference lines convert the three estimator classes onto the same ~6.4 mb/d design base implied by the tracker figure itself; they are different estimators, not bounds of one range. Each bar's hovercard names its source; asset links are in the master table above.

Asset-by-asset inventory (16 selected assets; each links its primary source)

Asset	Country	Hit	Capacity affected	Status (mid-Jul 2026)	Est. recovery
Strait of Hormuz	—	Feb 28 – present	~20 mb/d total oil transit (>15 mb/d exports basis)	~0.27 mb/d in the week to Jul 23, derived (band 0.11–0.43, exports basis, an AIS floor); 4.3 was the Jun escorted-transit average, before the Jul 15 re-blockade	None exists — political
Ras Laffan LNG + Pearl GTL	Qatar	Mar 18, 2026	12.8 MTPA LNG (17% of capacity) + 140 kb/d GTL	Force majeure; 2 of 14 trains down	3–5 years (LNG); ≤1 yr (GTL)
Russian refining system	Russia	194+ strikes H1 2026	~2.1 mb/d offline (trackers ~33%; IEA >20%; Kyiv claims 42.7%)	Runs fell <4 mb/d in early Jun (21-yr low)	Open-ended: re-hit on 2–3 wk cycles, parts sanctioned
Moscow refinery	Russia	Jun 2026 (×2)	~240 kb/d	Offline	Early 2027 (Reuters) — longest explicit Russian estimate
Omsk (largest) / Kirishi / Ryazan	Russia	Jul 6 (halted Jul 7) / May 5 / May 15	~440 / ~420 / ~340 kb/d	All halted	None given
Primorsk + Ust-Luga (Baltic)	Russia	Sep 2025; Mar 22–27 (3× in 5 days); May 3	~2 mb/d combined; ≥40% of export capacity offline at peak	Operating; exports back to ~4.2 mb/d	Days–weeks per strike
Novorossiysk Sheskharis	Russia	Nov 2025; Apr, May 2026	700–830 kb/d loadings	Operating	Days per strike
CPC (Kazakh crude)	Russia	Feb 2025; Nov 2025	~1.5 mb/d terminal	Restored	2–3 months per incident
Druzhba southern leg	Ukraine transit	Jan 27, 2026	250–300 kb/d to Hungary/Slovakia	Restored Apr 23	~3 months (politically gated)
Iranian refining system	Iran	Feb 28 – Jun 14, 2026	~70% of 2.6 mb/d cut (tracker est.)	Severe fuel crisis	No timelines; GDP −10% (tracker est.)
Kharg Island oil terminal	Iran	Mar 13 (military sites only)	90% of Iran's crude exports	Deliberately spared; operating	n/a — undamaged; July seizure floated
South Pars Ph. 14 processing	Iran	Jun 2025; re-hit Mar 2026	12 of 20 mcm/d gas	3 platforms restored ~May 30–31, 2026 (output via other plants)	~11 months (plant repair ongoing)
SATORP Jubail / East-West pipeline	Saudi Arabia	Apr 7–9, 2026	460 kb/d refinery; 700 kb/d pipeline flow	Refinery halted, pipeline impaired (April)	Not given (single-unit Gulf refinery hits restarted in weeks — the Ras Tanura pattern; no reporting on the pipeline)
Bazan Haifa refinery	Israel	Jun 2025; Mar 2026 (×2)	197 kb/d; 3 killed (2025)	Operating	2 wks partial / ~4 months full (2025)
Leviathan + Karish gas	Israel	Precautionary shutdowns	~1.5 bcf/d + Egypt/Jordan exports	Operating	~12 days (2025); 5 wks (2026)
Kremenchuk refinery	Ukraine	Apr 2022 + 69 missiles / ~260 drones	~370 kb/d design	Destroyed	Not restorable in wartime

The longest-recovery asset in either war is Qatari: Ras Laffan's two LNG trains (3–5 years). Conflict-wide, the IEA puts cumulative 2026–30 LNG supply losses at ~140 bcm (~15% of planned new supply) — knock-on effects to the global gas balance through 2030.
The Red Sea dog barked on 20 July — but quietly, and in the south. For most of 2026 transits stayed depressed on threat alone. Then the Houthis declared a Saudi-specific maritime embargo (20 Jul) and began hitting ships from 22 Jul: four Saudi-flagged tankers claimed, two independently corroborated — the Encelia, struck and afire ~70 nm SW of Al Shuqaiq (UKMTO Warning 095-26 logs the incident but names only "a tanker"; the Saudi Press Agency names the ship and reports the crew safe), and the NCC Masa, confirmed by the same Saudi source — plus the Jazan refinery. Every corroborated strike in the Red Sea corridor is near 17°N, close to Yemen, and none north of 20°N; missiles fired at Yanbu on 25 Jul were intercepted. So the north is still priced on threat, not ordnance — and that was enough to move it (the war-risk lanes). The corridor scoping matters: Abqaiq, far inland on the Gulf side, was hit by drones on 27 Jul.
One asset, six products. Ras Laffan appears on this timeline once, as LNG. The same outage stopped Qatari condensate and NGLs, about a third of world helium, Ras Laffan Olefins, the Gulf's largest liquid-sulphur stream and Pearl GTL's 30,000 b/d of Group III base oil. The mboe/d ledger books one of the six — and the complex was halted on 2 March, sixteen days before the strike, for want of an export route rather than from damage (what else was behind the strait).

The timeline shows the 26 largest assets; the full 33-asset inventory carries ~70 sources in the research notes.

Cross-cutting findings

The Russian repair cycle broke in 2026. In 2024–25, strikes knocked out single units and repairs took weeks. Now refineries are re-hit during repairs on 2–3-week cycles while Western catalysts and control systems are sanctioned — offline share ratcheted from ~20% (late 2025) to ~33% per trackers by July 2026 (the IEA itself says >20%; Ukraine's General Staff claims 42.7% — three different estimator classes, not a single range). Fuel rationing affects ~50M Russians; sector losses ~$13.5B since Aug 2025.
Flows vs capacity cut both ways. Russia's seaborne crude exports (~4.2 mb/d, July) now exceed pre-strike norms — dead refineries push crude to port — but 135 Mb sits loaded-and-unsold offshore. Iran is the mirror image: intact export terminal, collapsed buyers and passage (1.3 mb/d → <200 kb/d during the war; briefly ~65 kb/d under blockade).

Biggest movers: February → trough → latest, by producer (mb/d)

So what — depth is not the same as exposure — Saudi Arabia lost the most barrels, but Kuwait lost the largest share of itself and has neither a pipeline nor a second coast to lose it through. The two rows that go the other way, the United States and a deliberately flat China, are the scale the collapses should be read against.

○ Feb (pre-war) · ● trough · ● latest where recovery is visible. Bases are mixed by necessity (monthly crude surveys where they exist, EIA quarterly averages or liquids where not — hover a row); Russia is excluded here — its drone-strike decline rides in the waterfall's residual bar above, and its story is rerouting, not Hormuz. China is included precisely because it does not move: a flat row at ~5.5 mb/d is the control case, and the only large producer that had one. Values keyed from the table below.

Table view (monthly detail + notes)

Producer	Jan	Feb	Mar	Q2 avg / latest	Note
Saudi Arabia	10.30	10.40	7.25	6.57 May → 7.12 Jun	May lowest since 1990; heavier offshore grades shut; Petroline bypass carries light grades only
Iraq	4.34	4.57	1.57	1.46 (Q2, EIA)	>90% of exports via Hormuz; no bypass; most exposed producer — and oil is 88% of government revenue
Kuwait	2.60	2.54	1.19	0.66 (Q2, EIA)	Exports literally zero in March; deepest relative cut of any producer — and zero bypass of any kind, no pipeline and no second coast
UAE	3.61	3.64	2.37	3.08 liquids (Q2)	Murban kept flowing via ADCOP to Fujairah; offshore shut. Quit OPEC effective May 1
Iran	3.45	3.69	3.63	2.33 May; 2.85 Q2 avg (EIA)	Kept exporting through "its own" closure until the US blockade (Apr 13–May 29) cut exports to ~65 kb/d; June exports rebounded to ~1.76 mb/d (UANI tanker tracking) as the blockade lifted
Qatar (liquids)	~1.9	—	shut-ins	0.35 (Q2)	Ras Laffan strikes; condensate/NGL loss ~1.1 mb/d
Russia	9.26	8.67	8.96	8.94 (Q2, EIA)	Output below its start-of-year level and falling again into June ("sixth straight month" of decline — Moscow Times, 11 Jun, a different measure/vintage than this row); ~690 kb/d under quota; drones force crude out as refining dies
United States (crude)	13.57 (Q1)		13.88 (Q2, record)		Record quarter; liquids 24.31 mb/d
Brazil / Guyana / Kazakhstan	records: Brazil 5.32, Guyana 0.91 (Q2 liquids); Kazakhstan 1.88 (Mar crude)				The light-sweet offset, pulled East (+3.5 mb/d Atlantic-to-Asia)

OPEC+ crude collapsed 43.4 (Feb) → 35.2 (Mar) mb/d. Quota hikes continued as "paper formality" (+206 kb/d tranches; +188 kb/d for Aug). EIA/OPEC series break at May 2026 when the UAE (~12% of OPEC output) exited.

Who stopped buying: February → trough → latest, as a share of each buyer's own pre-war inflow

So what — severity is not size Japan lost 70% of its crude inflow, the deepest cut of the four and its lowest level since the series began in 1979; China's larger 4.89 mb/d cut was 41% — and is the only one with nothing back — together the four cut 6.34 mb/d in April alone, the demand side of the same shock the producer bars above measure on the supply side.

○ pre-war — 100% for every row, so the red segment's length is the depth of the cut · ● trough · ● latest. Right-hand figures give the cut and how much of it has come back; volumes in mb/d are one hover away and in the table below. Scaled this way because size is not severity: in mb/d China owns the longest bar and the second-shallowest cut, which ranks the four by how big a buyer each is rather than by how hard it was hit. The sub-labels give the reason: Hormuz exposure orders the depth of the cut for three of the four rows — Korea is the exception, 70% exposed and only 35% cut, and this report has no sourced explanation for why it outperformed its exposure. Read it against the producer chart above: those bars are barrels that stopped being pumped, these are barrels that stopped being bought. Every dot carries its own basis — customs tonnage for China, ministry kilolitres for Japan, a secured-cargo tally for Korea, a press mb/d print for India — and Hover a row for each dot's basis. Europe is absent, not zero: only ~10% of its seaborne crude came from the Middle East Gulf and it took ~4% of pre-war Hormuz crude exports, but no monthly European import volume was found at a citable basis, and an unsourced row is worse than an absent one.

Table view (per-dot basis, April-aligned total, why the troughs differ)

Importer	Pre-war	Trough	Latest	Cut at trough	% lost	% of cut back	Cut in April	via Hormuz	Basis: pre-war / trough / latest

Why there are two totals. The troughs do not share a month: Japan, Korea and India bottom in April at the blockade's peak, but China bottoms in June — its January–February stockpiling, then its own run cuts, pushed the low later. Summing four different worst months gives 8.59 mb/d, which was never true of any single month. April is the one month all four are measured in, and the April-aligned cut is 6.34 mb/d — that is the quotable figure and the one the strip above uses. Both are carried in the data so they cannot be conflated.

China's cut is over half the total and is the one with somewhere to go: its inflow loss was absorbed by stopped stockpile builds, a product-export halt, run cuts and a genuine stock draw — decomposed in the China-buffer panel. India's line is the counter-example: it ends the period roughly where it began, having replaced Gulf barrels with a record ~2.6–2.7 mb/d from Russia.

The wrong barrels came back: heavy crude out, light crude in (mb/d, Feb → May)

So what — quantity was replaced, quality was not ~12 mb/d of sour and condensate was locked in; ~3 mb/d of mostly light-sweet came back — the mismatch broke the benchmarks

Barrel counts regrouped from the producer waterfall above (same data, bucketed by grade class; the bypass pipelines carry only lighter grades, so what stayed locked in was the sour end). The largely-sour SPR barrels are one reason the coordinated release punched above its weight for refiners. Russia's medium-sour decline (waterfall residual) is excluded — those barrels rerouted, they weren't locked in. Consequences: Dubai benchmark "effectively broken" (basket cut to Murban+Oman); medium sour at times traded above light sweet; Urals discount $12.6 → $2–3 (WCS, by contrast, was assessed ~$14.40 under WTI for August barrels as of Jul 8); Venezuela's heavy sour got a policy boost (OFAC licenses, ~1.0–1.1 mb/d). Products worse than crude: Gulf product exports (3.3 mb/d) nearly all halted; >4 mb/d of Mideast refining shut; Singapore distillates hit $290/bbl; global runs bottomed ~77 mb/d in April. And products have a different bypass from crude: Saudi Arabia loads refined product at Jazan, Yasref and Rabigh on the Red Sea — though Jazan (400 kb/d) was struck on 24–25 July and shut, restart estimated ~15 August (IIR), and YASREF's and Rabigh's post-embargo status is unpublished — but Ruwais (837 kb/d), Al-Zour (615 kb/d), SATORP, Ras Tanura, Bandar Abbas and Abadan are all inside the strait — the product bypass belongs to one country and reroutes no Gulf-loaded barrel (the ledger).

Displacement & demand: oil avoided vs added back, 2022–2030 (mb/d) — the wars barely moved it, and 2026 runs backwards

So what — the transition is not a shock absorber — EVs and LNG substitution grind at a pace set by fleet turnover, which no price spike accelerates within a year. In the one year the market needed displacement most, it went the other way: war-priced gas pushed users toward oil.

Durable displacement is overwhelmingly structural (EVs above all; the wars' attributable share is a few hundred kb/d) and grinds upward regardless — but 2026 is the reversal year: war-priced gas is adding oil demand back via gas-to-oil switching and the un-done Gulf oil-burn program, knocking net displacement from ~2.4 to ~2.05 mb/d — the first year-on-year decline in the series.

Methodology & caveats (anchors, sources, the IEA–OPEC dispute)

Gas-to-oil switching adds back a few hundred kb/d (author estimate, keyed −0.2; the oft-quoted "up to +1 mb/d" is Energy Intelligence's September 2022 framework ceiling, not a 2026 observation) after the Hormuz closure knocked out ~20% of global LNG supply (TTF +32%, JKM +45% y/y); Gulf oil-burn reversal +0.3–0.5 mb/d (Rystad). The cheap-LNG-displaces-oil thesis is deferred to 2027–28 (Ras Laffan out 3–5 years; IEA: 140 bcm of 2026–30 LNG supply lost) and assumes the strait reliably reopens — faded bars are author scenario anchored to published endpoints. Related dispute: IEA vs OPEC disagree by a record 2.44 mb/d on the 2026 demand level (103.5 vs 105.94 mb/d; growth −1.0 vs +0.8, a ~1.8 mb/d growth-basis gap) — structural-vs-cyclical readings of the same weakness. Keyed with per-point status and source — hover any bar for provenance.

Sources: the IEA OMR and EIA STEO vintages linked under each chart above; every producer row and bar labels its own basis.

Beyond crude: the strait's other cargo — and why oil is the optimistic case

Every pipeline out of the Persian Gulf that avoids the strait is a crude oil pipeline. Petroline carries crude to the Red Sea; ADCOP carries crude to Fujairah. Neither moves an LNG cargo, a tonne of urea, a polymer pellet or an ISO container of helium. The one non-crude line — the 300 kb/d Abqaiq–Yanbu NGL pipeline — is, in the IEA's word, "fully utilised". So the bypass arithmetic that makes a Hormuz closure survivable is arithmetic about the single cargo that has a pipe, and every other thing in the strait is more captive than oil is.

What the other cargoes got instead was a truck. Four months of closure produced four routes, and they sharpen the point rather than blunting it. Alba trucked 40–60% of Bahrain's aluminium 1,400 km to Jeddah; SABIC trucked urea from Jubail to Yanbu in ~1,250 twenty-tonne loads to make a single 25,000 t cargo; Ma'aden announced the same for phosphate; and SABIC's polymers now leave on the Red Sea Express, a scheduled 1,100 TEU container service Mawani opened at Yanbu on 29 June — the sturdiest of the four, because it repeats. Every one of them is road freight to a Red Sea berth: one or two orders of magnitude smaller than the pipe it substitutes for, costlier per tonne, and — since 20 July — loading inside a declared blockade zone. So the claim is not that non-crude has no route; it is that non-crude's route is a truck lane to a coast that has now been brought inside the war.

That reframes the rest of this report rather than appending to it. The oil tabs measure a shock with a partial escape valve; this tab measures the shocks with none. It also changes what "recovery" means: crude comes back fastest, so the cargo the site is built around is the cargo that recovers first — while frozen potlines, damaged LNG trains and boiled-off helium run on clocks of months to years.

The bypass got its own blockade — and the barrels turned north instead of stopping

So what — a detour, not a loss Yanbu kept loading through July; Bab el-Mandeb transits fell 22–30% and Suez-routed Saudi crude rose 106% — but the northern lane is capacity-short of the volume it now has to carry.

On 20 July the Houthis declared a maritime embargo on Saudi Arabia — not a closure of the strait. The rule is written on the port call, not the position: a vessel that loads at a Saudi port may be targeted "in any location within the operational reach of the Yemeni Armed Forces." That distinction decides everything that followed. Their reach is southern — every corroborated strike sits near 17°N, and the missiles fired at Yanbu on 25 July were intercepted — so a cargo is safe at the Yanbu berth and hunted on the way out through Bab el-Mandeb.

So the barrels stopped turning left. Kpler puts Sidi Kerir loadings up 250 kb/d to 1.3 mb/d in the week to 27 July — its highest weekly level since the 2.2 mb/d of the opening week of the US–Iran war, apart from a brief 1.38 in late March — and Saudi crude reaching Asia via Suez up 106% to 1.06 mb/d. Aramco began offering spot cargoes ex-Sidi Kerir. Traffic through Bab el-Mandeb fell 22–30% on seven-day means (Windward −22%, IMF PortWatch −30%), with tankers down harder at 36–39%; the widely-quoted −56% is a real Kpler count but compares two single days in a series that swings between 20 and 46 with no embargo at all. The corridor did not close — 20 vessels still transited on the worst day.

The constraint on the northern lane is arithmetic, not threat. SUMED is rated 2.5 mb/d but has never been tested at capacity: its historical peak throughput is 1.77 mb/d, set in 2016. Against that, roughly 3.8 mb/d needs a home. And because every laden tanker sent north has to be matched by tanker capacity sailing back in, Kpler puts the full replacement programme at 3.9–5.1 southbound ballast transits a day — against 3.3 a day, the busiest stretch Kpler has ever recorded, in August–September 2022. The bypass has a bypass, and it is smaller than the flow.

Methodology & caveats (why the Yanbu volume estimates disagree by 1.4 mb/d)

Trackers conflict sharply on the week of 20 July and must not be averaged: Kpler and AXSMarine and Signal Ocean put Yanbu at 2.4–3.0 mb/d (−29% to −43% against Kpler's 4.23 the prior week), Windward at 3.09 — though Windward measures against a 5.16 mb/d baseline, 22% above Kpler's, so its "−40%" and Kpler's "−29%" are not comparable declines — and Vortexa at 3.8 mb/d and "broadly stable." The divergence has a stated mechanical cause — Vortexa observed four VLCCs, a Suezmax and an Aframax loading with transponders off, about a third of the week's volume, and Windward counted 11 dark tankers at Yanbu berths on 26 July plus 43 AIS gaps in the Arabian Gulf for 15–22 July, the highest reading in four years — that last figure is the wrong sea, so it is context for dark-fleet behaviour rather than evidence about Yanbu. AIS-based counts therefore understate by an unknown margin and the true figure plausibly sits at the Vortexa end. A separate and larger dispute: Wood Mackenzie puts the Red Sea bypass at ~2.39 mb/d in June (−41% from March), irreconcilable with Kpler's 4.1 for the same month. Both are named-provider estimates; both are published here; neither is reconciled. Aramco has declared no force majeure and confirmed no impact on crude loadings. The August OSP cut (Arab Light to Asia −$11) predates the embargo by two weeks and cannot be read as a response to it.

What has a route out

Six Hormuz numbers, one strait — which is which

So what — the denominators are not interchangeable Every figure below is right on its own basis and none of them can be compared to another without conversion — the two that get mixed up most often are ~20 mb/d of total oil transit and >15 mb/d on the exports basis, which differ by whether products and NGLs are counted.

Figure	mb/d	What it counts	Where it appears
Total oil transit	~19.9	Crude + condensate + products + NGLs through the strait, pre-war. ≈25% of world seaborne oil trade. Decomposes as 14.95 crude & condensate + 4.93 products (IEA).	The headline "~20 mb/d" everywhere; the 17% captive share on the ledger below is computed against the crude leg
Oil exports basis	>15	Oil exports only, a narrower basis from a different provider (Windward). Never compare this to ~20 — the observed monthly transit figures are on this basis.	Phase readings: ~2.0 at the Mar–May trough, 4.3 the June escorted-transit average
Gulf export capacity	16.5	What eight Gulf producers could ship by any route, strait or bypass. A capacity, not a flow, and the denominator the corridor model allocates.	The overview board's first lane; the corridor explorer
Still moving eastward	~2.1	Since the 15 July re-blockade: a derived 0.27 through the strait (band 0.11–0.43, a floor — AIS cannot see dark vessels) plus 1.8 via ADCOP to Fujairah, which lands outside it.	The board's first lane; next measured reading is the IEA August OMR
Idle behind the strait	~11.8	Export capacity minus everything leaving by every route, including the Red Sea. Not 16.5 − 2.1: the Petroline volumes do get out, they just go the other way.	The board's hatched block
Flow cut on the outage strip	~11	The transit reduction the outage timeline draws, on its own exports-derived basis — and excluded from that chart's total, because at 6× the largest damaged asset it would flatten every other step.	The outage timeline's hatched Hormuz strip

Two conversions worth having: the ~20 total-transit basis is ≈25% of world seaborne oil trade, while the 17% figure on the ledger below is the share of that trade held captive — transit minus what the bypasses move. And the closure duration depends on which start you pick: de facto 28 Feb → 17 Jun is 109 days, the declared 2 Mar → 17 Jun is 107. Every row here is canonical in notes/canonical-figures.md, which is the file to change first if any of them moves.

Every pipeline out of the Gulf was built for crude — share of each cargo with a route that avoids the strait

So what — every pipe out was built for crude Hormuz alone holds 17% of world seaborne oil trade captive; the Red Sea embargo takes another 5 points on top — and the one demonstrated non-crude bypass, Bahrain's aluminium trucked to Jeddah, lands inside that same blockade zone. Everything is scaled to world supply of its own cargo, so the rows are comparable.

Table view (every row's route, fate and caveat)

Cargo	Hormuz flow	Route out	Basis	Fate	The route, or why there isn't one

Methodology & caveats (what the percentages are shares of)

The x-axis is a share of each cargo's own flow, not of the 19.87 mb/d oil total — the rows are not slices of one pie and the bars must not be summed. Only the eight rows with a published world-supply share are drawn. The other five are named in the line under the chart and carried in full in the table view — a row with no denominator gets a name, not a bar. Crude appears twice on purpose: the IEA's 3.5–5.5 mb/d is untested nameplate against 14.95 mb/d of crude transit, while the second crude bar is now the measured outcome: Yanbu went from 0.97 mb/d in 2025 to 4.2 in April 2026 and Fujairah to ~1.8, so about 4.5 mb/d of diversion actually happened — inside the IEA's band. The two bars therefore read as capacity against realized; this report's own pre-war 1.5–2.0 mb/d estimate was refuted by roughly 2.5× (ledger). The argument gets sharper for it: the bypass ran at nameplate and still left ~70% of the Hormuz crude flow with no route at any price, while every non-crude cargo stayed at zero — a claim that cannot be dismissed as pessimistic modelling. (The corridor explorer shows the same barrels moving.) LPG/NGL is marked non-additive: those volumes already sit inside the 4.93 mb/d products line, and the 300 kb/d shown is a pipeline capacity, not a flow. Sulphur is drawn as an unmeasured band rather than a number because the Etihad Rail route to Fujairah demonstrably exists — which refutes the "Gulf sulphur has no bypass" claim — but its 2026 utilisation is not published. Aluminium's 40–60% is road freight for one producer and does not generalise to bulk cargo. Oman's ports (Sohar, Duqm, Salalah) are outside the strait; sources that code Oman as fully exposed are wrong.

What it did to prices

Brent gave back most of its war premium. The cargo with no bypass did not.

So what — the shock is seaborne — and US natural gas, the same molecule on the far side of an ocean, never had a war premium at all.

Table view (levels in native units, and the share of the premium given back)

Series	Feb 2026 (base)	Peak	Latest	vs base	Premium given back	Basis

Methodology & caveats (proxies, coal's spec, and the propane trap)

Every series is IMF Primary Commodity Prices via FRED, so the panel shares one estimator class and one monthly-average basis. Brent here is the IMF monthly average, not the daily spot the price tabs use — mixing a monthly average with a daily close inside an indexed comparison manufactures divergence. JKM and TTF are not on this chart: FRED carries neither, so PNGASJPUSDM ("LNG, Asia") and PNGASEUUSDM ("Natural gas, Europe") stand in as free proxies and are labelled as such. Coal is indexed only. FRED's series is IMF's 12,000 Btu/lb (26.45 MMBtu/t) spec, not the 6,000 kcal NAR (23.8 MMBtu/t) spec behind the fuel ladder; converting it here would overstate it ~11% and put the two panels on different bases. Propane is a basis trap: measured from the February base on monthly averages it slightly leads Brent; measured daily from 5 January it lags Brent by about 16 points. Both are computed in the builder and neither may be quoted without its window.

Europe's Qatari LNG went to exactly zero in April. Its Russian LNG did not.

So what — exposure ≠ pain — Europe's molecular exposure to Qatar was single-digit and it vanished in one month; the pain since has been pure price transmission.

Table view (partner split by month, mio m³)

Month	Qatar (QA)	Qatar via other	Qatar total	Qatar share	Russia	United States	All partners

Methodology & caveats (the partner trap)

Eurostat nrg_ti_gasm, siec=G3200 — which is liquefied natural gas specifically, not total gas, so the Russian series here is Russian LNG and not TurkStream pipeline volume. The partner trap: Eurostat's QA code does not capture every Qatari cargo — Poland's land under "Other Near and Middle East Asian countries". Reading QA alone undercounts Europe's Qatari share by roughly 2 points, so both are charted and the Qatari total is their sum. That aggregate may contain non-Qatari origins; it is attributed here because it goes to exactly 0.0 in the same month QA does. The IEA independently puts Hormuz LNG at "just around 7% of Europe's total LNG inflows", which brackets the 6.3–8.1% computed here. Volumes are million cubic metres of gas, not tonnes of LNG.

Nitrogen round-tripped. Phosphate didn't — and phosphate's driver is Gulf sulphur.

So what — the lagged channel — the food test window is the Oct 2026 and 2027 harvests, and it is still open.

Table view (each benchmark with its own pricing basis)

Benchmark	Feb 2026	Peak	Jun 2026	vs Feb	Pricing basis

Methodology & caveats (why the bases can't be combined)

World Bank Pink Sheet monthly, and every column has a different basis: urea is fob Middle East, DAP is fob US Gulf, TSP is import US Gulf, phosphate rock is an administered contract quote fob North Africa, potash is Brazil CFR granular. So they cannot be combined into an input-cost decomposition: World Bank DAP prices off Tampa sulphur and Tampa ammonia, not the Gulf inputs this tab is about, and any waterfall built against Qatari sulphur would fit by coincidence. Flat rock was never abundance — it is an administered benchmark that did not reprice, which is precisely what isolated processing cost as the driver through the doubling, and roughly half of world traded sulphur is a by-product of Gulf sour-gas processing with no supply elasticity and no route out. That window has now closed: rock moved in June and again in July, so from here the panel can no longer read a phosphate move as processing cost alone. Note also that the FAO headline food index has risen mainly on vegetable oils (+10.2% since February), not cereals (+1.4%) — do not attribute the food index move to the fertilizer channel.

What it cost to move anything

One percentage, every cargo: war risk as the universal multiplier

So what — priced once, paid by every cargo — insurance is not one more affected market; it is a single percentage applied simultaneously to crude, LNG, urea, wheat and washing machines.

The strait itself (% of hull, per voyage) — axis to 10%

The Red Sea lanes — the bypass, repriced — axis to 3%

Table view (every print with its source and confidence)

Reading	As-of	% of hull value	Conf.	Source	Note

Methodology & caveats (the baseline dispute, and the $21m that isn't insurance)

The multiple is a range because one broker's own deck disputes itself. Howden Re's table (p.11) reads “~0.10–0.125%” pre-conflict while its prose (p.12) reads “from 0.25% of the insured vessel value pre-war” — and the table's own next row implies 0.25% too (“~$250,000/transit ($100M vessel)”). The two pages credit different sources. Marsh independently puts pre-war at 0.25%, so the honest floor-to-ceiling is 0.10–0.25% and the rise off it is 30×–100×. Al Jazeera's “1–3%” is not a pre-war baseline and is not used as one: it is Marsh's level “weeks ago” as quoted by Platts on 22 July — i.e. during the June–July truce — and it sits on the chart at that date (ledger). The 19 March and 26 March prints are not a decline — they are different books and different vessel classes a week apart; do not read a falling line between them. And the $21m is not insurance. The same source reports "about $21m" as the insurance cost for a 270,000-tonne tanker, but 270,000 × $77.96/t = $21.05m — that figure is the all-in freight bill at the quoted rate, not a charge on top of it. Insurance is a component of the $77.96 and the source does not break it out, so this card quotes the freight premium over the five-year norm and never adds the two. Conversion at 7.33 bbl/tonne (Arab Light runs ~7.6, so the $/bbl figures are marginally conservative).

Gas-fired metal: the one industry hit from both sides at once

So what — destroyed, not delayed — a frozen potline is destroyed capital, which is why this line recovers in years while crude recovers in weeks.

Table view (monthly output, revisions, and the events)

Month	t/day	First print	Monthly kt	vs pre-war	Note

Methodology & caveats (revisions, and a baseline that reconciles)

International Aluminium Institute monthly statistics, via two IAI releases fetched 2026-07-25. March has two real prints — IAI first reported 15,963 t/day and later revised to 15,000; both are carried here rather than one silently overwriting the other, and the pair is one source revising itself, not two sources disagreeing. The baseline reconciles: 17,800 t/day × 365 = 6.50 Mt/yr, which is IAI's own "around 6.5 million tonnes in 2025, or 9% of global capacity". This supersedes the 6.16 Mt / ~8% figure carried in the research notes. The double exposure is the point: these smelters are gas-fired, so the LNG shock is their power cost, while the strait is their route — and their inbound alumina and petroleum coke transit it too. Gulf producers shipped 860,500 tonnes of primary aluminium to the United States in 2025.

Ranking the damage

Rank the strait's cargo by irreplaceability, not tonnage

So what — oil sits at the bottom of this board — sorted by captivity × time-to-restore, the cargo this whole site is built around sits at the bottom of the board.

Table view (each clock and the basis for it)

Cargo	Captive	Months to restore	Fate	Basis for the clock

Methodology & caveats (the clocks are judgement; helium's two clocks; why this isn't a scatter)

The captivity figures are derived, the clocks are argued. Captivity comes straight from the bypass ledger — a cross-check asserts the two charts can never disagree. Every restoration clock, by contrast, is an author scenario with a stated basis per row, except Ras Laffan's 3–5 years, which is QatarEnergy's own published repair estimate. Treat the whole horizontal axis as scenario. Sulphur carries "captivity unmeasured" rather than a number, because its ledger row is an unmeasured band — printing its derived 0% here would assert a full bypass that nobody has established. Captivity is not the sort key it appears to be: eight of the thirteen cargoes sit at exactly 100% captive, so that column separates almost nothing on its own. Rows are ordered by captivity × duration, which means the ranking you read is very largely the clock. Helium carries two marks because it is two events. Qatar is ~33% of world helium structurally, but the 3–5 year repair clock belongs only to the ~17% of Ras Laffan capacity that was damaged; the rest sat on the strait's clock, since the complex halted on 2 March for want of an export route, sixteen days before it was hit. Multiplying the structural share by the repair clock would overstate the event roughly twofold. And for helium delay is destruction: it must be transported within 45 days of liquefaction or it boils off, so even a short closure destroys inventory rather than postponing it.

Compiled 2026-07-25 from a six-lane commodity research sweep, each lane adversarially verified; the verification pass refuted 13 fatal and 51 major claims and only the survivors appear here. Full derivation, port geography, the cut-list and the open questions are in notes/chokepoint-cargo.md; the bypass figures are canonical in notes/canonical-figures.md. Structural facts live on this tab; the time-varying material stays on the tabs that already track it.

Lifelines: the infrastructure that burns the energy — water, power, air

Every other tab on this site measures infrastructure that produces the barrel or ships it. This one measures what the barrel is for: the desalination plants that make the drinking water, the grids that run the air conditioning, the cloud regions, the airspace. These assets are not upstream of the shock. They are what the shock is ultimately a shock to — and in this war they were also targets, which is new.

One comparison reframes the whole site. The OECD entered this war with roughly 13 months of oil cover — 396 days. Bahrain publishes a four-day water reserve, and the UAE plans on two days of normal consumption. Four years of sanctions policy and the largest collective stock release in IEA history were spent defending the deepest buffer these states had, by two orders of magnitude. The thin ones were never in the frame.

But depth is not the finding this tab can chart, so it is not the one it leads on. Days-of-cover figures for water are mostly a division the source performed, not an inventory anyone audits, and they turn on a denominator that swings by 22× between normal Gulf consumption and severe rationing — a ranked ladder of them would imply a precision the sources do not carry. What is measured, published and load-bearing is the coupling: roughly three-quarters of GCC desalination is cogeneration bolted to a gas-fired power plant, so the LNG premium on the fuel-divergence chart is the marginal cost of Gulf municipal water, and the same shock that closed the strait is also this fleet's input cost. That is the spine below, and the strike ledger, the grid deficits and the aviation collapse all hang off it.

Water, and what it runs on

Gulf drinking water is a manufactured good — and the factory is gas-fired

So what — the LNG premium is the water bill — roughly three-quarters of GCC desalination is cogeneration bolted to a power plant, so the LNG shock is not adjacent to the water supply; it is its input cost.

Table view (both denominators, capacity, and whether the country was struck)

Country	Drinking water	Total demand	Capacity	Renewable fresh water	Struck	Note

Methodology & caveats (the two denominators invert — do not quote one as the other)

Both columns are from CSIS, 19 March 2026, and they measure different things. Drinking-water share is the share of potable supply from desalination. Total-demand share includes agriculture and industry, which in the Gulf run largely on fossil groundwater — so the two columns invert: Saudi Arabia is 70% desalinated for drinking but only 18.1% of total demand, while the UAE is 42% for drinking and 52.1% of total demand. A builder check asserts that inversion so no future edit can collapse them into one number. Saudi Arabia's low total-demand share is not evidence of water security; it reflects irrigation drawing on aquifers that do not recharge. Bahrain's "over 90%" is charted at 90 as a conservative floor. Oman's coast is largely outside the strait on the Gulf of Oman, so its exposure runs through shared fuel supply rather than the chokepoint — the same geography correction the bypass ledger makes.

Thirteen strikes on things civilians drink, breathe and log into

So what — fragility, mostly not yet harm — the buffers were threatened and never actually drawn down, which is the honest finding and a different one from the headlines.

Table view (the full dated ledger, with attribution and confidence)

Date	Lifeline	Country	Asset	Fate	Conf.	Outcome for users	Attribution	What happened

Methodology & caveats (contested attribution; what is not a strike)

This is not the outage timeline. The Supply tab's timeline tracks assets that produce the barrel; every row here is an asset that consumes energy to keep civilians alive, and no row appears on both. Confidence is a column because attribution is contested. High means the operator or host government confirmed damage to its own asset — which is why the AWS and Kuwaiti rows are high and most others are not. The Qeshm Island strike is the extreme case: the damage is corroborated (30 villages lost supply, still out of service a month later) but every named party denies it — Iran accused the US, the US and Israel denied it, the UAE denied Israeli reports it had done it, and Trump denied knowledge. It is carried at medium with attribution recorded as disputed. Two rows are not strikes at all. Iran's 87-day internet shutdown was a government act — NetBlocks confirmed it was ordered, not broken — and the Barakah and Jebel Ali rows are near-misses carried because the concentration of what was nearly hit (43 desalination units on one site; a 5.6 GW reactor complex) is itself the finding. Iran's own Assaluyeh water claim is carried at low confidence: Israel confirmed striking the petrochemical complex, not the water units.

Power and air

The megawatts that aren't there — and what they'd have run

So what — already realized — this is not a forecast of hardship; it is four-to-six-hour daily blackouts in Iranian industrial zones and full-day stoppages at Iran Khodro and Saipa.

Table view (deficits and comparators, kept separate)

Row	MW	Kind	Basis	Note

Methodology & caveats (three scenarios, one source; what Iraq's row is not)

Iran's three figures are one source, not three. The 10 GW optimistic, 13 GW realistic and 18 GW worst cases all come from Iran's own parliamentary research centre, so they are charted as a single range with the realistic case as the midpoint. Showing them as three rows would read as independent estimates converging, which they are not — and the source is the deficit-holder's own government, which has incentives in both directions. Iraq's row is not Iraq's total deficit, which is much larger and long predates this war. It is only the generation lost to the cut in Iranian gas: deliveries fell to 5–7 mcm/d after strikes affecting South Pars and were still 15–20 mcm/d from early May, against roughly 50 mcm/d needed to run Iraq's gas plants properly. The GCC interconnector that was supposed to cover the gap slipped to at least end-August 2026. The three comparator rows are capacities, not deficits, drawn at reduced opacity and marked so they are never summed with the deficit rows — they exist because "13,000 MW" means nothing until it is 2.3 Barakahs.

One region's war took global air travel negative

So what — visible in the world total — IATA published the ex-Middle East figure precisely because one region had become large enough to invert the global sign.

Table view (every reading, its metric family and its source)

Reading	Change	Metric	Period	Source	Note

Methodology & caveats (three metrics that aren't comparable; IATA's own two numbers; what the closure cost)

Overflights are the wrong measurement and are not charted here (they were until 25 July — ledger). They count aircraft passing overhead and barely move with whether anyone is travelling: a throughput metric standing in for a demand metric. What is charted is demand, and it turns out to be far larger than the routing story. Three metric families are on one axis and they are not comparable. RPK is IATA demand by region of carrier registration, so a Gulf carrier flying Bangkok–London counts as Middle East traffic; passengers is throughput at one hub, including transfer passengers who never enter the country; flights is third-party schedule analysis, not carrier-reported traffic — a cut schedule is a decision, an RPK fall is an outcome. They are coloured separately and a builder check asserts all three stay labelled. IATA published two different numbers. The 28 May release carries −48.1% for Middle East carrier RPK in its data table and quotes Willie Walsh saying 46.6% in the same document; the likeliest reading is total-market versus international-only, but IATA does not say, so the table figure is charted and the quote is kept beside it. This was demand destruction, not a trimmed schedule: Middle East capacity fell 38.4% while traffic fell 48.1%, so the load factor dropped 13.1 points to 70.1% — fewer aircraft and emptier ones. The airspace closure is the mechanism, not the measure. EASA prohibits Iranian, Iraqi and Lebanese airspace through at least 31 August 2026, against the 1,000–1,400 daily overflights Iran handled before the war; a rerouted widebody burns an extra 2–3 hours at $6,000–7,500 per flight-hour ($12,000–22,500 a flight, priced off the same barrel), and Iraq's ~800 aircraft/day at ~$450 each is $360,000/day of sovereign fees, or $15,000/hour — arithmetic the builder recomputes rather than quotes. The 2025 twelve-day war supplies the only clean measurement of where the traffic goes: Saudi overflights exactly doubled, 700 to 1,400 a day. That pair is 2025 evidence, labelled as such in the data because a draft carried it as 2026 when a search summary dropped the year. A full-year 2026 Middle East contraction of about 11.4% appears in secondary write-ups of IATA's revised outlook and is deliberately not charted here.

Compiled 2026-07-25 from a five-lane research sweep — water, power, compute, connectivity, aviation — with every load-bearing claim verified against a second source before it was charted. Two figures were caught and corrected in that pass: a Gulf desalination plant shut by an approaching oil slick is real but dates from 2019 (the tanker Zainab off Sharjah, 23 million gallons/day offline) and is carried here as precedent rather than as evidence, and the Saudi overflight doubling belongs to the 2025 war. Full derivation, the incident ledger's sourcing and the open questions are in notes/lifelines.md. Two lanes are deliberately thin. Connectivity: no subsea cable through Hormuz or the Red Sea has been cut in this war, and reporting a risk as a loss would be the same error this tab exists to avoid. Compute: it appears here only where it was struck — the operator-confirmed AWS rows in the ledger above. A panel charting the Gulf AI buildout's projected cooling-water draw against the desalination fleet was built and then cut: its only measured input was 15 bn litres of 2024 Saudi consumption and its headline was 28× that, so a card on the thinnest-buffer tab would have rested on the most speculative number in the repo. The AI buildout is also not a lifeline — it is a competing industrial claimant on the same fleet, which is a different argument needing different evidence.

Reserve drawdowns — so far and projected

The largest collective release in IEA history (400 Mb, announced Mar 11) bridged the gap for four months without offsetting the loss — and the bill is due: the US SPR is at its lowest since February 1983, OECD government stocks since December 1990, just as hostilities resume — and the US draw rate has fallen 59% from its May peak, four straight weeks below the pace the announced schedule implies.

US SPR: 2026 drawdown in detail, and the refill paths into 2027 (million barrels)

So what — the trough is fixed, the pace is a price call All three paths share the ~243 Mb trough and differ only in pace — which leg plays out is effectively a price call

Table view (2026 actuals + scenarios; full 2022–26 history below)

Date	Actual (Mb)	DOE claim (program pace)	Analyst (announced schedule)	Extended-release (author)
2026-02-27 (pre-war peak)	415.4	—	—	—
2026-05-01	392.7	—	—	—
2026-07-31 (latest)	304.8	304.8	304.8	304.8
2026-09-13 (trough at program pace, 1.26 mb/d)	—	~243	—	—
2026-09-25 (trough on announced schedule, 1.02 mb/d)	—	refilling	~243	~243 (draws continue)
2026-12-31	—	~305	~243	~194
2027-02-26	—	—	—	~177 trough
2027-06-30	—	~405	~287	~177
2027-12-31	—	~443	~331	~177

Week ending	SPR (Mb)	Context
2022-01-07	593.4	Pre-Ukraine-war baseline
2022-04-01	564.6	180 Mb emergency sale announced Mar 31 (sold ~$95/bbl)
2022-12-30	372.4	~221 Mb drawn in 2022
2023-07-07	346.8	Post-Ukraine low (flat bottom Jul 7–28)
2024-12-27	393.6	Refill: 59 Mb bought <$76/bbl + 140 Mb mandated sales canceled
2025-06-13	402.3	12-day Israel–Iran war: no release (Hormuz never closed)
2026-02-27	415.4	Pre-war peak; 2026 war begins Feb 28
2026-05-01	392.7	172 Mb release (US share of IEA 400 Mb) delivering
2026-06-05	349.2
2026-07-10	316.5	−98.9 Mb from pre-war peak (holiday-dip week)
2026-07-17	311.4	−104.0 Mb from pre-war peak
2026-07-31	304.8	Lowest since February 1983; −110.6 Mb from pre-war peak

All three toggleable paths share the committed-release trough (~243 Mb = 304.8 − 61.4) and differ only in pace and whether the war ends.

Methodology & caveats (path construction, DOE-claim reconciliation)

All paths are generated from documented arithmetic, not hand-drawn, and every pace shown is one DOE has actually run. When the committed leg completes is a pace call, so this is the one place the three answers are stated together: the remaining 61.4 Mb runs dry on Sep 25 at the announced-schedule 1.02 mb/d — the date this report ticks, and the trough the chart above annotates — as early as Sep 13 at the observed program plateau of 1.26 mb/d (the May 15–Jun 19 average, used by the DOE-claim path), and as late as Nov 20 if the latest weekly pace of 0.54 mb/d holds. Every completion date elsewhere on this page is generated from these three paces, so none of them can drift apart. The DOE claim path takes DOE's "~200 Mb within the next year" of war end at face value — note the claim does not reconcile with its own components (133 Mb exchanges + ~40 Mb premiums + ~2 Mb funded purchases ≈ 175 Mb; see the release chart above); the analyst path (Sparta/OilX) starts returns in 2027 and spreads ~175 Mb over two years — pre-war levels only by 2028. Both require the war to end and companies to have crude to return. The extended-release path is an author scenario for the July 8 re-escalation persisting: releases don't stop when the committed 172 Mb completes — halting the draw before the November 2026 midterms is assumed politically untenable — so draws continue at ~0.6 mb/d (scenario pace, just under the recent post-plateau average) through the elections, taper, and bottom at ~177 Mb in late February 2027, brushing the top of the 100–150 Mb analyst-estimated unusable band: the SPR effectively runs out of usable barrels. No returns while the war continues. Authorized capacity 713.5 Mb. Historical context (2022–26 drawdown and refill) in the table view above.

Weekly draw rate (mb/d) — the plateau, then a fade four prints deep

Table view (weekly draw rate since the drawdown began)

Week ending	SPR (Mb)	Draw rate (mb/d)	Change (Mb over week)

The draw plateaued at ~1.26 mb/d through June 19, then faded every week bar one: 0.41 in the week ending July 31 (304.8 Mb — lowest since February 1983). The four-week pace is down 59% from its May peak, and four straight weeks now sit below the 0.73 mb/d the announced schedule implies. At the latest ~0.41 mb/d the remaining 61.4 Mb completes around December 30 — and holding this pace flat is now the optimistic reading of the trend, not the pessimistic one.

Methodology & caveats (basis, pace readings)

First derivative of the level chart (weekly change in EIA WCSSTUS1, ÷7 to mb/d). The post-plateau weeks ran 0.79, 0.89, 0.43, 0.72, 0.54 and 0.41. This page previously read the 0.43 as a July-4 artifact and the 0.72 bounce as a return to the announced-schedule leg; the two prints after it retired that reading — the 0.72 was the outlier. Four candidate causes, and the weekly series is net, so it cannot separate them: a deliberate stretch-out ahead of the statutory floor and the midterms; withdrawal-rate decay with fill and cavern condition; netting against early exchange returns (contractually post-war, and hostilities resumed 8 Jul); or an ordinary end-of-programme taper, which the timing argues against — this is day 142 of a "~120-day" programme with 36% undelivered. What would separate them: DOE's monthly SPR inventory and movement reports, or any DOE/GAO statement on achievable rate at sub-300 Mb fill. Weekly SPR movements reflect cavern delivery scheduling as much as policy intent (corroboration: factually.co, accessed 2026-07-21).

The global picture

IEA collective action: 400 Mb committed, 252 Mb released by Jun 12 (incl. ~74 Mb of lowered industry stockholding obligations, not government barrels) — DOE's refill claim exceeds its own components.
China: built ~1.4 bn bbl onshore and never touched its government SPR — the world's largest de facto buffer serves China only.
Commercial stocks (US, wk ending Jul 31): crude −7.0% vs 5-yr avg; Cushing 21.0 Mb 3.0 Mb above operational tank bottoms; gasoline −6.4%; diesel −9.0% — fuels, not crude, are the shortage.
Global inventories: drew 129/74/143 Mb Mar–May; June's +21 Mb "build" was oil-on-water, not onshore restocking.

Detail (release mechanics, revisions)

Commitments: US 172 Mb, Japan 80, Korea 22.46, Germany 19.5; ~148 Mb still undelivered as of Jun 12. The US mechanism is mostly exchanges — ~133 Mb loaned with in-kind premiums up to 24%; analysts put realistic returns at 1–2 years, and only $171M exists for outright purchases (~2.3 Mb).
China drew commercial stocks (−41 Mb in June alone) and halted product exports; the implied-use tally is in the China-buffer panel below.
April's global draw was revised from an initial −117 Mb in the June OMR; refining margins sit at 4-year highs.

The 400 Mb collective release: who committed what — and the repayment arithmetic (Mb)

So what — the biggest release, and it still doesn't add up The largest collective action ever ran 63% delivered by 12 June, and the repayment DOE calls “~200 Mb within a year” has components summing to ≈175 — the release side is a measured fact and the return side is a claim; the two bars are drawn on one scale so the gap between them is the thing you see.

Bottom bar: why DOE's "~200 Mb returns within a year" doesn't reconcile — its own components sum to ~175 Mb, and analysts spread even that over two years.

How the gap was bridged: production, stock draws, and oil-on-water, Feb–Jun 2026

So what — demand did most of the work Stocks and cargoes at sea covered at most 4.6 mb/d in any month; the shaded gap demand destruction absorbed runs 3.7–7.3 mb/d — the buffers bought time, but the market was balanced mostly by people buying less, which is a form of adjustment nobody chose and nobody can bank for next time.

Table view

Month (2026)	Production shipped/stored	+ Onshore reserve draws	+ In transit (oil-on-water)	Net stock draw	= Delivered
Feb	106.9	~0	~0	~0	—
Mar	97.0	+0.4	+3.8 (draining to ports)	+4.2	101.2
Apr	95.1	+4.2 (inferred)	−1.8 (inferred)	+2.5	97.6
May	94.5	split not published; not inferable (no water figure)		+4.6	99.1
Jun	98.8	+3.2	−3.9 (armada reloading)	−0.7	98.1

March's cushion was mostly pre-war cargoes draining into ports — tankers, not tanks. The shaded distance between delivered supply and the pre-war demand path is what demand destruction absorbed: 3.7–7.3 mb/d a month, more than stocks and water combined.

Methodology & caveats (inferred splits, vintages)

The blue bar is the month-on-month change in IEA world supply, net of shut-ins — the −9.9 in March is the largest monthly drop ever recorded; green is what onshore reserve draws added; orange is the oil-in-transit contribution (positive = cargoes at sea draining into ports, negative = floating storage absorbing supply). Delivered supply = production + net observed inventory change (−129 Mb Mar, −74 Apr revised, −143 May, +21 Jun). April's components are inferred (hatched): the IEA never re-published the split after revising April's total, but the tanker-tracked on-water figure (+53 Mb, May OMR) survives, so onshore is the residual (+4.2 draw, −1.8 absorbed) — mixed vintages, treat as estimate. May has no published water figure, so one gray net bar. June detail: oil-on-water +117 Mb, ~35 Mb exiting Hormuz within a week per Kpler, while consumers kept draining tanks (+3.2 incl. 44 Mb government). All figures are estimates subject to revision.

China's buffer: the implied burn vs what trackers actually saw (cumulative Mb since Mar 1)

So what — the reserve was never opened — the counterfactual line is what China would have had to burn to keep consuming at pre-war rates. It didn't. The reserve is still there, which is why China's buffer is a live variable in every scenario ahead rather than a spent one.

Table view (customs imports, shortfalls, and believed reserve scale)

Month (2026)	Customs imports (Mt)	mb/d	Shortfall vs Jan–Feb baseline	Basis

Believed reserve scale (opaque — each row its own estimator and basis; never blend)	Mb	Cover at observed ~1.4 mb/d war draw

June absorption channel	mb/d	Basis

How June's −4.9 mb/d was absorbed — reserves were the last resort

So what — rationing, not reserves — the two channels that cost nothing politically came first; the government reserve was never touched. Every barrel absorbed this way is one China does not have to buy back, and one the market does not get handed back when the war ends.

US stocks vs the 5-year range (Mb) — where winter starts from

So what — three of the four start below range — every barrel of this is the cushion the winter draws down from, and three of the four are already below their own five-year range.

How unusual each one is, on one scale

Each one against its own five-year range

Commercial crude ex-SPR

Cushing, OK

Total motor gasoline

Diesel & heating oil

Gasoline and especially distillate enter the winter season at or below their 5-yr bands, and Cushing is 3.0 Mb above operational tank bottoms — the starting conditions behind the risk case. Each panel is on its own scale, in Mb; the ranked chart above is the one place the four are comparable.

Projections and the thinner buffer

EIA (Jul 7, pre-re-escalation): draws flip to builds by Q4, "attenuating" the price decline toward $65; the SPR troughs near ~243 Mb (304.8 − 61.4 remaining), and repayment restores ~pre-war only by 2027–28 — if the war ends first.
A second Hormuz-class closure meets a usable buffer roughly 370–470 Mb thinner than in February — the central risk of the July re-escalation, quantified below.

Round-2 stress test: how long would the buffers last this time?

So what — a third of the runway is gone — round one was fought with a full tank; the same shock now starts from two-thirds of it, which is why the scenario prices sit higher than the round-one prints they are calibrated against.

Scenario modeling. Usable buffer = SPR after the 100–150 Mb cavern-condition haircut and the 68.0 Mb still-committed release, plus other-IEA government stocks and US commercial excess; months measure endurance at the 2.1 mb/d release ceiling — price closes the rest.

Methodology & caveats (components, judgment calls)

The larger ~416 Mb usable-buffer decline quoted elsewhere additionally reclassifies the 68 Mb still-committed SPR leg out of "usable". Other-IEA government stocks are approximated from IEA aggregates (~800 Mb Feb → ~637 Mb now). Counting US commercial stocks above their 2015–25 floors is an author judgment call — excluding it gives ~17 vs ~12 months. Release contribution is capped at the 2.1 mb/d maximum pace observed in April; the shut-in range 8–11 mb/d spans the round-1 June average but sits below the observed peaks.

Sources: the EIA weekly series and IEA release documentation linked under each panel above.

Market response: what price summoned — and what it destroyed

If Brent holds $90–120+, the textbook answer is that supply appears and demand adapts. The 2026 evidence: the believable 12-month supply response is roughly 0.6–1.1 mb/d against a 9.5–15.5 mb/d scenario shut-in — so demand did the balancing. And "demand destruction" is three mechanisms wearing one label: price-elastic industry idled first (petrochemicals are ~half the downgrade), the poor were rationed by absence, and rich-world drivers barely flinched — realized 2Q26 deliveries fell 4.8 mb/d y/y, the sharpest since Covid.

New barrels — what price can summon

The fuel ladder: every fuel in $/MMBtu, ranked — and the Brent price at which oil stops beating each (late July 2026; individual prints Jul 7–22)

So what — gas-to-coal is the only fast lever ≈1.0–1.2 mb/d-e can shift from gas to coal within months — the one big fast lever — while gas-to-oil switching pushes the other way, adding oil demand.

Table view (native price, $/MMBtu, as-of and source per fuel)

Fuel	Native price	$/MMBtu	Oil beats it below (Brent, $/bbl)	As-of	Source

Methodology & caveats (conversions, what parity ignores)

The lever, sized: 55–65 bcm/yr of IEA gas-to-coal potential, with caps and bans already lifted across Asia and ~1.8 bcm realized by June. Gas-to-oil switching adds up to a few hundred kb/d of oil demand while Brent sits below the ~$102 JKM crossover. LNG cannot fill in from elsewhere: the non-Gulf ramp is already spent (+27 bcm Mar–Jun ≈ 0.5 mb/d-e, ~¾ of the Gulf hole) and the next real increment — the 2027–28 wave, ~+50 bcm/yr ≈ 0.9 mb/d-e — arrives after this war, not during it. Pure conversion arithmetic on keyed price prints (every conversion recomputed and asserted): crude 5.8 MMBtu/bbl, VLSFO 38.5 and MGO 43.5 MMBtu/t, coal 23.8 MMBtu/t (6,000 kcal/kg NAR, the ICE Newcastle/API2 spec — not the 25.1 of the older 6,330 GAR basis). Btu parity ignores plant-efficiency spreads (a 50%-efficient CCGT vs a 35% coal or oil steam unit shifts power-sector thresholds in gas's favor), carbon (EUA €75 adds ~$3.2/MMBtu to coal, ~$1.6 to gas in the EU), and logistics adders (LNG bunkering +$1–1.5/MMBtu). Product versions of the same test: Singapore VLSFO $638.50/t ≈ $16.6/MMBtu (≈ the front-month crude line), MGO $905.50/t ≈ $20.8 — burning residual fuel oil beats spot LNG by a hair; burning diesel does not. Sources and access dates: linked per print in the table view above.

Wells back in the black: WTI breakevens vs the price (survey averages, $/bbl)

So what — price stopped being the constraint ≈+0.1 mb/d in weeks (DUCs) · +0.25–0.5 mb/d by end-2027 — at $100 or at $150 — price stopped being the constraint at ~$70.

Table view (every region and firm-size split, Dallas Fed Q1-26 / KC Fed Q2-26)

Threshold	Region / group	WTI ($/bbl)	Note

The "back in the black" margin is the wrong margin: everything already produces above ~$50, so there is no shut-in inventory waiting on price. The margin that matters is new drilling ($62–70), crossed in March — what follows is what producers did with it. KC Fed's Tenth District puts profitable drilling at $66, inside the Dallas Fed band and from a different survey, so the two corroborate each other; it is left off the chart for that reason rather than drawn as a fourth row.

Methodology & caveats (opex floors, strippers)

What binds instead of price: capital discipline, record-low DUCs, and a strip capped by the 2027-surplus outlook. Nothing is shut in waiting for higher prices — everything produces above ~$50 — so "back in the black" buys ~0 extra barrels. Dallas Fed: "All respondents can cover operating expenses for existing wells at current prices." WTI bottomed at $55.44 (Dec 16, 2025) and spent only ~3 weeks below $58 in 2025–26 — still far above every opex floor; the ~420k stripper wells producing ~915 kb/d stayed on throughout, so the reactivation channel is worth tens of kb/d at most. New-drilling breakevens are up 30–40% from 2020 on cost re-inflation.

…and how many barrels the price signal actually buys (incremental US supply, mb/d)

The observed 2026 record matches the low rows: WTI spent 43 of 51 post-escalation days above $90 while the satellite rig count fell — rigs turned only when the strip validated ~$75–80 (+45 rigs in six weeks from mid-June). Above ~$70 the cost curve stops binding at all; capital allocation, service capacity and lead time bind instead.

Methodology & caveats (survey basis, rigs, cash flows)

Survey rows are producers' own modal answers (Dallas Fed, 120–125 firms); model rows are Rystad scenarios. Kayrros satellite rig count fell 534 → 462 Jan–Apr (Baker Hughes flat ~543–545) — 2026 budgets were built at $55–60 and the spike was read as temporary; the turn came at the KC Fed's $83 "substantial increase" threshold with the classic 4–6-month lag (588 rigs Jul 17, +44 y/y). The DUC cushion is at a record low (4,972 in April). At $100 avg WTI, ~$63 bn of extra 2026 shale FCF (Rystad) is earmarked for payouts and debt — Dallas Fed Q2 "expected capex next year" index: 0.0. Non-US short cycle is slower still: oil sands ~1 mb/d over ~7 years, Vaca Muerta infrastructure-paced; Rystad's average new-project breakeven is $47.

OPEC+: quota theater vs deliverable barrels (mb/d)

So what — the quotas moved, the barrels did not 0.02 mb/d (what's actually spare) to ~1.5–2 mb/d (only if it can reach water) — higher prices change OPEC+'s press releases, not its deliveries.

The two smallest rows are the point: the world's shock absorber sat inside the chokepoint that failed — EIA surplus capacity (Table 3d) collapses to 0.02 mb/d for Q2–Q4 2026. What can move outside the strait is Petroline/Yanbu plus ADCOP, and in 2026 that was measured, not estimated: Yanbu went 0.97 → 4.2 mb/d and Fujairah ~0.5 → ~1.8, so ~4.5 mb/d of diversion happened — and the UAE took ADCOP out of OPEC on May 1.

Methodology & caveats (estimators, logistics)

Why nothing arrives at the margin: the cadence is pre-planned, the spare sits behind the strait, and the fast rungs (Petroline surge, ADCOP) were pulled in March — until transit clears, at which point the 2027 surplus, not scarcity, becomes the problem. EIA surplus capacity ran 3.0–3.6 mb/d a year earlier (3.9 in early 2025) and recovers to ~2.4 only in 2027; the IEA's March estimate of effective spare — a different estimator, shown separately, never blended — fell 3.6 mb/d in one month to 0.32, the lowest on record. Petroline ran a record ~7 mb/d throughput with ~5 claimed exportable. The binding constraint is the terminal, not chartering: Kpler measures Yanbu at 4.2 (Apr) and 4.1 (Jun) against a 4.5–4.7 sustainable ceiling. Quarterly series in the table below.

Table view (EIA STEO surplus capacity by quarter, 2025–2027)

Quarter	OPEC surplus capacity (mb/d)	Status

The reaction function: what OPEC+ actually did at each price

Table view (meeting by meeting: tranche, Brent context, outcome)

Meeting	For	Tranche (kb/d)	Brent context	What happened

Five consecutive pre-planned hikes straight through a $126.41 intraday peak and back to $72: OPEC+ sells insurance against physical shortage, never against risk premium — and 2026's shortage is one it cannot serve. What to watch: the Aug 2 meeting; all of it is paper until the strait clears.

Methodology & caveats (historical templates, forward calendar)

Same reaction function as March 2022 (a <15-minute meeting approving the pre-planned +400 kb/d at $120+ Brent). The historical templates — 2004–08 (produced flat-out, no cushion, price found $147) and 2011 Libya (Saudi +700 kb/d while the IEA bridged with 60 Mb) — both required barrels that could reach water; this time consumer stocks did the work again (252 Mb delivered by Jun 12). A September tranche completes the 1.65 mb/d unwind, with the 2.0 mb/d Oct-2022 group cut flagged from as early as October. The flip side caps the upside: IEA's July balances imply a ~5 mb/d surplus in 2027 if transit normalizes — which pins Dec-27 futures near $78 and, via the strip, keeps the shale response asleep.

Open everything? The frontier scorecard — and every lever on one chart

So what — the experiment already ran ≈0 mb/d before 2030 from frontier acreage — the experiment already ran, mid-war — ANWR's June 5 lease sale, held with Brent in the $90s–100s, drew $3.7M and zero majors.

The frontier scorecard, lever by lever (sales, permits, DPA, federal share)

Lever	What happened when it was pulled	Barrels, and when

The revealed preference is precise: industry paid a record $164.7M for NPR-A acreage next to existing roads and pipe in March, and eleven weeks later just $3.7M for ANWR-adjacent frontier. Where policy did deliver barrels in months — the Venezuela licenses — the capacity already existed and was merely switched off, the general rule of every row below.

Methodology & caveats (timelines, license detail)

The sale ran under mandated-sale law and 28-day permitting. Even a funded ANWR is first oil ~10 years after leasing, peaking ~880 kb/d in the 2040s (EIA's own model); with >7,500 approved federal permits already sitting unused, acreage was never the constraint — capital, whipsaw risk and the strip are. Even the NPR-A barrels are a 2030s story: Willow, fully supported and half-built, runs FID Dec 2023 → first oil early 2029 → 180 kb/d. The Venezuela licenses (GL 49/50, Feb 13 2026; amended to GL 50A Feb 18) restored output to ~1.07 mb/d by May.

Time to barrels, next four years: the cumulative track — and the buffer dropping out

Destroyed demand — what price removed

The demand waterfall: where 1.4 mb/d of 2026 demand went (change vs the pre-war forecast, mb/d)

So what — the cheap half is already spent −1.37 mb/d on the 2026 average — half of it invisible (idle crackers), and the cheap half is already spent — the elastic channels fired first; if scenario A persists past the SPR cliff, the next ~3–8 mb/d (the scenario-A uncovered gap once the release leg ends, mid 6.4 — author scenario) must come from deeper rationing or recession, which is why the fitted price curve steepens as buffers empty.

Table view (the forecast erosion, vintage by vintage — and the OPEC/EIA counterpoints)

Vintage	2026 demand (mb/d)	Print

Where it landed: the same loss, three lived experiences

Red = rationed by decree or absence, amber = industry shut on margin, green = merely trimmed by price; each tile states its own basis.

The grid is the euphemism argument in miniature: the deepest percentage cuts sit in countries that produce no oil and set no prices — while the world's largest consumer shows up in green. Each tile links its sources.

Three mechanisms, one label — and what snaps back

So what — most of it reverts, the EV pull-forward does not Most of it reverts when supply does; ~0.5–0.9 mb/d never comes back — the IEA already pencils demand +8 mb/d off the May low by October and +2.0 mb/d in 2027. What's permanent: the EV pull-forward (China's fleet alone displaces 540 kb/d of 2026 gasoline) and the two-year path netting ~0.7–0.9 mb/d below the pre-war trend. What's not even destruction: China's import collapse (−3.6 mb/d Feb→Apr) was mostly stock-financed deferral — it returns as the 2027 restocking bid.

Mechanism	2026 magnitude	Snaps back?	Evidence

The distributional reading is the ugly one: the market cleared by poverty and idle factories, not rich-world inconvenience. Only ~25–30% of global gasoline/gasoil demand sees full market price pass-through (IEA) — the rest adjusts through subsidy budgets, FX crises, and queues.

Second-order: the fertilizer → food transmission (the shock that lags a season)

So what — an affordability squeeze, not yet a food crisis An affordability squeeze so far, not a food-price crisis — the test window is Oct 2026–2027 harvests — urea doubled then halved, and FAO's food index sits at 130 vs 160 at the 2022 peak.

Table view (supply-side anchors, each with its linked source)

Anchor	Value	As-of	Basis

Why it retraced: prices halved because China reopened urea exports, SABIC opened a Red Sea route at Yanbu, and the northern-hemisphere season ended — every one of those reliefs is fragile. The thing to watch for is a 2022-style food-export ban cascade; so far the 2026 cascade is only in inputs.

Methodology & caveats (supply shares, scenarios, pass-through)

The arc: $400 → >$850 at the April peak (India's record tender hit $935/t, ~86% above its February basis per AMIS), then halved as China reopened exports and Saudi rerouted via the Red Sea. Fertilizer works on planting calendars, so if round two runs through the autumn, India's rabi top-dressing (Nov–Jan), Brazil's September window (~30% covered) and East Africa's next planting take the yield hit into 2027. The Hormuz strait carries 32–36% of world urea trade (CRU puts it near 40% including Iran; a 45% figure in circulation is an outlier) — and the shock has since migrated from nitrogen to phosphate: urea is back below its February level while DAP and TSP, though both off a June peak, are still well above it — and the rock benchmark that sat unmoved through the whole doubling has now begun to reprice (the nutrient split). QAFCO's 5.6 Mt/yr plant (14% of traded urea) shut March 4 and Iran — the world's #3 urea exporter — idled all seven complexes. The China quotas are only 1.5–1.6 Mt (Jun–Aug, $660–670/t floor) and close after August; Yanbu is the same Red Sea chokepoint the tanker war threatens; the farmdoc extended-conflict scenario has US urea peaking near $996/st in October — right at the fall-application and rabi windows. Pass-through template: IMF put a 10% fertilizer rise at ~7% on cereal prices after one quarter. Keyed with a linked source per anchor (table above); two low-confidence secondary figures are excluded.

Methodology & compilation

Supply-response side compiled 2026-07-23 by three parallel research agents; survey breakevens are averages of self-reported firm responses (ranges are ranges of regional averages, not firm-level dispersion). The demand and fertilizer material was compiled the same day from the IEA OMR free PDFs (Feb–Jul vintages read directly), AMIS Market Monitor 138, World Bank CMO April 2026 and Food Security Update #122, IMF WEO Update July 2026, and the fertilizer research sweep. Every figure above links its source; the claims this tab has changed since publishing are in the corrections ledger.

What if the strait stays closed — and what if the bypasses go too?

Both corridors at once — where the barrels go, and how much

Interactive — measured presets, modelled combinations Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb are not independent. Petroline moves barrels out of the Hormuz denominator and into the Bab el-Mandeb one, so the same Saudi barrel cannot be charged against both straits — and closing both costs more than closing each — set the two corridors and read the interaction term below. The four scenarios that actually happened carry Kpler's published splits; every other combination is output from the allocation model and is badged as such.

Scenario Hormuz Bab el-Mandeb measured —

Where — schematic; topology and relative position are real, distance is not

How much — widths are mb/d throughout; the same volumes as the map above

Delivered Delivered late — longer route, smaller ship Pipeline, spare capacity Not exported

Table view (routes and volumes in the selected scenario)

Route	Fate	mb/d	% of capacity	Basis

Supply: where the barrels go in each scenario (mb/d)

So what — what the buffers can't reach — the release ceiling is fixed at 2.1 mb/d whatever the shut-in is, so every extra barrel lost lands entirely on the uncovered bar. That bar is the one price has to close, and it is what separates the two scenarios.

Scenario	Shut-in (mb/d)	Demand destruction	Net gap	Release offset (max)	Uncovered — price must close	Uncovered, % of demand	Buffer endurance (mo)

Prices: three regimes, in order of buffer depletion (Brent, $/bbl)

So what — the buffer is the regime — the rows are not a forecast path but three pricing regimes, and what moves between them is not the size of the shut-in. It is whether there are still barrels in a reserve to meet it.

How to tell which scenario you're in

Discriminator	Why it matters	Scenario A signature	Scenario B signature

If the blockade holds: the next 24 months, in six-month chapters

Scenario — author narrative Buffered $94–137 through year-end → rationing $147–203 as usable SPR exhausts Feb–Mar-27 (the full OECD buffer, ~13 months at the 2.1 mb/d release cap from mid-Jul-26, runs to ~Aug-27) → the fork in late-27: B at $182–272, or reopening into the deferred glut (~$65 base) — the prose is judgment; every number is a constant published elsewhere in this report (price bands from the panel above, SPR dates, demand tranches, the supply trickle from the time-to-barrels waterfall).

How to read it: this is the walk-forward of scenario A persisting — not a forecast, and not the base case (the market prices 14% odds of persistence into Q4 as of the Aug 5 strip, against a $115 severe case). The four-year lesson compressed into one strip: the first six months are paid for by buffers, the second six by decree, the third by recession — and the fork at the end is the only place a supply answer reappears. Chapters and corridor are generated from the closure-scenario price rows directly, so the bands cannot drift.

The war-powers clock, and the branch where this ends early

Scenario — author narrative Four deadlines land inside one month — the War Powers 60-day expiry ~6 Sep, the committed SPR leg running dry at ~243 Mb (Sep 25 on the announced pace), fiscal year end, and the withdrawal deadline ~6 Oct — all inside the sixty days before the midterms — which is why a second MOU is the most likely path to lower prices, and why Iran, not Washington, holds the stronger clock.

How to read it: the dates are statutory or scheduled facts; the reasoning between them is judgment, and the two probabilities are author estimates rather than model output. The legal deadline is a forcing function, not a constraint — Congress has never used the War Powers Resolution to end a campaign, and in July the Senate killed the binding joint resolution 47–49 while the House passed a concurrent one 214–208 that compels nothing. What the deadline actually does is manufacture a decision on escalate-or-deal at the moment the oil buffer runs out, right before an election.

About this site Damstrait is an independent research report on how the Russia–Ukraine war and the 2026 US/Israel–Iran war reshaped global oil flows, prices, and strategic buffers. Every figure links to its primary source (agency data, official releases, or named press reporting); hovercards carry per-datum provenance and as-of dates. The legend under the tabs distinguishes observed data (traces to a primary series), third-party estimates (provider named), and scenario/forecast output (author modeling, assumptions disclosed in the methodology blocks).

Data & vintage Chart data regenerated … from FRED and EIA raw series (daily prices lag a few business days), IEA OMR and EIA STEO July 2026 vintages, and hand-keyed press/agency figures — merged under … cross-consistency checks. March–June supply figures are agency estimates subject to revision. The situation is live: the US–Iran ceasefire collapsed 2026-07-08, and figures dated earlier exclude the re-escalation. First compiled 2026-07-16; substantially expanded 2026-07-17 through ….

Disclaimer Research and educational material, assembled with AI assistance and human review. Scenario figures are conditional illustrations, not predictions. Nothing here is investment, trading, or policy advice.

Corrections & withdrawn claims (…)

Date	Card	What this report said	What replaced it

Rows marked also keep a compressed note on the card itself, because the correction changes how the number now shown there should be read. The rest are settled and live only here. Errors found in research but never published are not corrections and are not listed; they are in the per-topic files under notes/.