Disruption Scenario

What happens if the Strait of Hormuz closes?

Closing Strait of Hormuz halts 21 Mb/d. Bypass routes can take 3.5 Mb/d, leaving 17.5 Mb/d displaced — 17% of world liquids demand.

Chokepoint detail →Open on the map →

Mb/d halted (full closure)

3.5

Mb/d bypass capacity

17.5

Mb/d displaced (17%)

Model the closure

100% halted

OpenPartialFull closure

Mb/d halted

3.5

Mb/d bypass

17.5

Mb/d displaced · 17%

Bypass routes

East-West (Petroline), Saudi Arabia+2.6 Mb/d
Abqaiq → Yanbu on the Red Sea, so it clears Hormuz outright. Cargoes then sail north through Suez or south through Bab el-Mandeb — a second closure there would re-trap them.
ADCOP (Habshan–Fujairah), UAE+0.6 Mb/d
Reaches the Gulf of Oman directly, so it clears Hormuz outright.
Goreh–Jask, Iran+0.3 Mb/d
Commissioned but lightly used; availability is a political question, not an engineering one.

No stock cover reported to JODI by China, Singapore — absent from the cover ranking, not necessarily well covered.

Thinnest stock cover

Exposed importers holding fewer than 30 days of consumption in reported stock, from the Joint Organisations Data Initiative. Thin cover is who feels a sustained disruption soonest — not a prediction that they will.

India25 days · 2026-03

Refining capacity exposed

The exposed importing countries hold 20,590 kb/d of refining capacity across 72 refineries. This is capacity that sits in exposed countries — not a claim about which refineries buy crude through this route, which is sourcing data the atlas does not hold.

Indicative planning arithmetic over published transit volumes and nameplate bypass capacity. It is not a supply forecast: it models neither price response, demand destruction, inventory release, spare production capacity, nor how quickly tonnage can physically reposition. Nameplate capacity is consistently higher than day-one deliverable capacity.