Dueling permission slips
Brent crude traded at $102.64 per barrel Thursday, up 0.71%, while WTI held $93.67, up 0.76%. Natural gas jumped 3.2% to $2.81 per MMBtu. Brent briefly pushed above $105 intraday before pulling back, as traders weighed two competing signals out of the Gulf.
Iran's lead negotiator said Thursday that the regime has begun collecting money on the new tariff it is charging vessels that enter Hormuz. That converts what began as a blockade into a going concern, and it tells the market Iran plans to run the chokepoint for months, not weeks.
President Trump countered from Washington that the United States has "total control" of the waterway and that any ship needs Navy clearance to transit. Both claims cannot hold at once. The tape is pricing the gap.
The blockade count climbs
US Central Command said the running tally of ships it has turned back from Iranian ports has reached 31, most of them oil tankers. On Thursday, American forces boarded the Majestic X in the Indian Ocean, describing her as part of Iran's sanctions-evasion fleet.
Trump separately told the Navy to "shoot" and "kill" any crew caught laying mines in the strait, a sharp rhetorical step up even while the extended ceasefire technically remains in force. No fresh round of talks has been scheduled since the Islamabad channel broke down earlier this month.
Physical flow is still crushed
Only about 3.8 million barrels a day of hydrocarbons cleared Hormuz in early April, per IEA tracking. That compares with a normal pre-crisis pace comfortably above 20 million, making this the deepest single-chokepoint shock the agency has on record.
Offline crude capacity across the six Gulf producers — Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain — has climbed to roughly 9.1 million bpd this month, a step up from the 7.5 million shut in during March. Those are the barrels actually missing from the world. Iranian forces have also fired on commercial vessels inside the strait this week, keeping insurers and crews away.
The US fills the gap, sort of
Where is the shortfall being patched? Partly at American ports. The latest EIA weekly showed US crude and product exports clearing a record 12.88 million bpd, as customers across the Far East and Europe scrambled for cargoes anywhere outside the Gulf.
That export pull, plus fresh draws across refined product stockpiles, tells refiners that domestic demand is holding even with retail gasoline near $4.08 a gallon — roughly a dollar above the pre-war average. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this week he still sees a path back to $3 gasoline at some point over the summer driving season.
What to watch next
- Whether Iran publishes a formal toll rate card, which would make the levy harder to unwind inside any settlement
- The next round of US-Iran talks, currently unscheduled
- Any restart timeline from Saudi Aramco on the damaged East-West pipeline
- OPEC's May Monthly Oil Market Report, due mid-May
For now, every new seizure is a bid and every diplomatic opening is an offer. The market is trading the spread between them.