Crude oil exports from the Middle East have climbed above pre-war levels on several days in late September, according to provisional data from the ship-tracking firm Kpler. Exports exceeded the pre-war benchmark on September 24 and again between September 27 and 29, reaching 19.5 to 22.5 million barrels per day (bpd). Between March 2025 and February 2026, before the US-Israeli war on Iran began, exports averaged 18 million bpd. Goldman Sachs estimates that Gulf exports reached about 23 million bpd at the end of September, roughly the 2025 daily average.

The picture is more complicated than the headline numbers suggest. Kpler's seven-day moving average for crude exports stood at 18.5 million bpd on October 1, and its figures exclude vessels that crossed the Strait of Hormuz with transponders switched off. Part of the late-September surge came from a roughly ten-day outage of Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, after a drone attack by an Iran-backed Iraqi militia on September 11. Riyadh diverted crude onto tankers that sailed through Hormuz, the narrow waterway at the mouth of the Gulf. Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar are still exporting below pre-crisis levels, and shipments of refined products such as diesel, petrol and jet fuel have not recovered. Some Gulf refineries have been damaged by Iranian strikes, and loading flammable fuels onto tankers that could come under fire is judged too dangerous.

Tehran presents the situation very differently. Ali Fadavi, a senior commander in Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said on Sunday that only three to four million bpd are moving through the US-supervised route, calling that "negligible" compared with pre-war traffic. He also claimed that no US vessels were present in the Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman or the northern Indian Ocean, and that US warships were "100 percent vulnerable". Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran's top negotiator, said the strait would stay closed until Washington accepts Tehran's seven-day plan to reopen it. The UK Maritime Trade Operations agency has reported at least one attack a day in the Strait of Hormuz or the Gulf of Aden since October 2.

Markets remain unsettled. Oil trades at around $100 a barrel, and renting a supertanker from the Gulf to China costs about $1 million a day. Diesel is particularly scarce, and the G7 industrialised countries plan to release large fuel volumes from their reserves.

The tensions are pushing Gulf states to reduce their dependence on Hormuz. The United Arab Emirates has adopted a "Zero Hormuz" strategy, investing billions of dollars in expanding the port of Fujairah, which lies outside the Gulf, and the Habshan pipeline to the Gulf of Oman. Kuwait is considering storage in Asia, a larger fleet and possibly a pipeline. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has predicted that new pipelines could make the strait "worthless" within two years. Analysts are sceptical: an Iraqi pipeline to the Mediterranean, estimated at $15 billion, faces funding and track-record problems, and most Gulf oil goes to Asia rather than Europe. Qatar, which must chill gas to minus 162 degrees Celsius for shipping, has said it will use only the strait. Pipelines are also easier to attack than ships, as the September strike showed.