Ships going dark, then reappearing on the other side
Seven or more tankers slipped through the Strait of Hormuz between May 20 and May 26, the first significant movement of oil and gas through the waterway since the US-Iran war shut it down in late February. Three supertankers loaded with a total of six million barrels of crude made it out around May 20. Days later, a VLCC hauling Iraqi oil and three LNG carriers bound for Pakistan, China, and India followed.
The crossings do not signal a reopening. Daily traffic through the strait sits at roughly 10% of the 95-140 vessels that used to pass each day before the war. More than 600 tankers remain stranded inside the Persian Gulf, according to Saudi Aramco's CEO. But after three months of near-total shutdown, even a trickle is news.
Iran picks who passes
None of these ships forced their way through. Iran set up what it calls the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, a vetting body that screens each vessel across more than 40 categories of data, from ownership chains and crew lists to cargo manifests and port of destination. Ships that clear the process are guided through Iranian territorial waters on a lane north of Larak Island, with IRGC personnel overseeing the transit.
Malaysia struck a separate arrangement. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim phoned his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian and won clearance for seven ships linked to Malaysian operators. Tehran waived transit fees for those vessels, framing the exemption as goodwill toward a nation that had stayed neutral. Five of the seven had crossed by late May.
Other ships reportedly paid up to $2 million per transit, with some reports citing a $1-per-barrel charge on oil cargoes.
The IRGC said on May 26 that 25 vessels had crossed in a single day under Iranian coordination. CNN was unable to confirm the figure.
AIS blackouts and war-risk insurance
Most of these tankers cut their tracking signals during the crossing, choosing to risk violating international transponder rules rather than broadcast their position through a contested waterway. The VLCC Eagle Verona, hauling close to two million barrels of Iraqi Basrah crude toward Ningbo, kept its AIS active only while inside Iranian waters. It dropped off tracking screens again about 20 kilometers beyond Larak Island. The LNG carrier Al Hamra vanished from vessel tracking for over a month before showing up off the Indian coast.
Insurance pricing tells the same story. Premiums for war-risk coverage now run between 3% and 8% of a vessel's hull value. For a large tanker, that works out to somewhere between $3 million and $8 million just to make the crossing. Before the war, the same coverage cost around 0.25%. Richard Meade, editor of Lloyd's List, put the timeline for market normalization at September at the earliest, regardless of when the strait officially reopens.
What it means for supply
The volumes getting through are tiny against the scale of the disruption. The IEA considers the Hormuz shutdown the biggest supply disruption the oil market has ever faced, with more than 14 million barrels per day locked behind the blockade. QatarEnergy invoked force majeure on its entire LNG portfolio on March 4, taking roughly a fifth of global LNG supply offline.
Six million barrels across three supertankers is what the strait used to handle in a few hours. A handful of LNG carriers does not replace the three ships per day that Qatar alone was sending out before the war.
Brent crude traded at $93.76 on Wednesday, well off its $114 peak from early May but still up sharply from pre-war levels near $60. WTI sat at $90.51. The market has been whipsawed between deal optimism and fresh escalation for weeks.
"Oil prices are being whipsawed by developments in the Middle East once again, with what appears to be de-escalation quickly turning to re-escalation," said Warren Patterson, head of commodities strategy at ING.
The tankers that crossed last week proved that cargo can still move through the strait. Whether shipowners and insurers are willing to bet on that at scale is a different question entirely.