Oil & the Two Wars

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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. Until 30 Jul 2026 this row carried a 1.5–2.0 mb/d pre-war estimate whose stated basis was that Yanbu had rarely loaded above 2.5; events refuted it by roughly 2.5×, so the two bars now read as capacity against realized rather than optimistic against honest. 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.

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.

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.

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. A draft of this analysis built a "92% of the DAP price is three Gulf inputs" waterfall against Qatari sulphur and North-West-European ammonia; World Bank DAP prices off Tampa sulphur and Tampa ammonia, so the fit was coincidence. That chart was cut rather than patched. Flat rock is not abundance — it is a benchmark that did not reprice, which is precisely what isolates processing cost as the driver, and roughly half of world traded sulphur is a by-product of Gulf sour-gas processing with no supply elasticity and no route out. 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.

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×. Corrected 31 July: this card previously treated Al Jazeera's “1–3%” as a pre-war baseline, which produced a spurious 2.5× floor. That figure is Marsh's level “weeks ago” as quoted by Platts on 22 July — i.e. during the June–July truce — and it now sits on the chart where it belongs. 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).

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, because a draft of this analysis mistook the pair for conflicting sources. 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" — an earlier draft flagged this baseline as implying 104% of nameplate, which was wrong. 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.

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. This was drawn as a captivity-vs-duration scatter first and it failed: eight of the thirteen cargoes sit at exactly 100% captive, so that axis carried almost no information while the labels collided, and two rows fell outside any window tight enough to separate the rest. One row per cargo cannot collide and cannot clip. 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.

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.

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.

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.

An earlier version of this card charted overflight counts and it was the wrong measurement. Overflights count aircraft passing overhead and barely move with whether anyone is travelling — a throughput metric standing in for a demand metric. What is charted now is demand, and it is 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.

All paths are generated from documented arithmetic, not hand-drawn, and every pace shown is one DOE has actually run: the program plateau of ~1.26 mb/d (May 15–Jun 19 average; trough Sep 9, used by the DOE-claim path) or the announced-schedule ~0.97 mb/d (trough Sep 25, used by the analyst and extended-release paths). At the latest weekly print's ~0.72 mb/d — the pace re-accelerated after the Jul 10 holiday dip — the committed leg completes around October 20, per the draw-rate panel below. 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.

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 and 0.73 (three-week average ~0.68 — squarely on the announced-schedule leg); the 0.43 was a holiday artifact, not a policy slowdown. Weekly SPR movements reflect cavern delivery scheduling as much as policy intent (corroboration: factually.co, accessed 2026-07-21).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. This note previously said Yanbu had rarely loaded >2.5 mb/d and that chartering therefore bound the bypass; 2026 refuted it — Kpler measures Yanbu at 4.2 (Apr) and 4.1 (Jun) against a 4.5–4.7 sustainable ceiling, so the terminal, not chartering, is the constraint and it sits far above the old figure. Quarterly series in the table below.

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.

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.

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 is +25% and TSP +37% with the rock benchmark unmoved (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.