Tanker Data Contradicts Energy Secretary's Hormuz Claim

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Tuesday that oil is again flowing normally out of the Middle East — a claim ship-tracking data does not appear to support.

Wright posted on X that the seven-day average for oil leaving the Strait of Hormuz was "up to almost 9 million barrels per day," that pipelines and export facilities move another 5-7 million barrels a day, and that "on Sunday alone, over 20 million barrels left the Arabian gulf region, which is above the pre-conflict average."

Tanker trackers put actual traffic through the strait at a fraction of pre-war levels. "It is not possible to reconcile the disparity between what we see and what he is quoting," Matt Smith, director of commodity research at the ship-tracking firm Kpler, told CNN.

The Claim vs. The Data

The claim: Roughly 15 million barrels per day total leaving the region, including almost 9 million a day out of the Strait of Hormuz, with Sunday above pre-conflict levels.

The traffic: Just 84 vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz last week, including only nine on Sunday, according to Kpler, which tracks flows using satellite imagery and shipping transponders. Before the war, the strait saw more than 100 transits a day.

The volume: Oil is getting out of the strait, but the figure is closer to 4 million barrels per day, according to JPMorgan.

Monday's count: Six vessels transited the strait — four inbound, two outbound — and none of them were crude oil tankers, said Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates. Kpler data cited by Reuters put the same day at six commodity vessels, down from 11 in the latest 10-day average.

The government's own forecaster: The Energy Information Administration said Tuesday in its Short-Term Energy Outlook that it had raised its estimate of Middle East shut-in crude production "due to continued severe constraints on Strait of Hormuz transits, which we assume persist through August."

What checks out: Wright's pipeline number appears accurate, CNN reported. Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline alone has rerouted upward of 5 million barrels a day to the Red Sea, and traffic through the Bab al-Mandeb strait has run close to normal in recent weeks.

The Administration's Response

The Department of Energy did not respond to CNN's request for comment on the discrepancy.

Wright addressed it himself in a follow-up post on X, saying the Energy Department coordinates with the U.S. military to maintain "the best available data related to oil and oil products leaving the Arabian gulf," and that his figures include tankers that crossed the strait with their lights and transponders switched off to hide from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and tracking satellites.

Forbes contributor David Blackmon argued that critics may be comparing the wrong things: Wright's phrase was oil "leaving" the Strait of Hormuz, which would also cover tankers that had been sitting idle east of the strait or loaded at UAE and Omani ports on the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea — not simply transits through the waterway.

There is a further gap nobody can fully measure. Of the 84 vessels that passed through the strait last week, 17 were shadow-fleet crossings and 10 carried sanctioned cargo, according to the shipping data service Windward Intelligence. It is not clear whether Wright counted them.