# Oil Is Leaving the Gulf Again, by Relay. That Is Recovery of a Kind, and It Is Not the Same as a Working Strait > The shuttle trade that ferries crude out of Hormuz has rebounded after a lull. The official numbers describing that recovery also describe a waterway carrying roughly a third of what it used to. - Source: India Max - Canonical URL: https://indiamax.net/article/hormuz-oil-shuttling-picks-up - Author: Ananya Rao - Section: Business - Published: 2026-08-02T08:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-02T08:00:00.000Z - Tags: Crude Oil, Strait of Hormuz, Shipping, Energy Security --- The improvised service that has been getting oil out of the Strait of Hormuz has picked up again after a pause, according to a report in The Economic Times. It works as a relay. Vessels carry crude out of the Persian Gulf, frequently with their transponders switched off, and hand it to other ships waiting outside the waterway, which then sail on to buyers. It emerged at the height of the fighting and has kept some producers in business since. The pickup is real and the evidence for it is varied. Two shippers are said to be moving volumes close to what they carried before the latest escalation, which pushed crude back to 100 dollars a barrel last week. Buyers of Gulf crude have started receiving cargoes that were overdue. Images from the European Union's Sentinel-1 satellite showed at least seven pairs of ships conducting transfers near the Omani port of Sohar on Thursday, four of them the length of supertankers, against just two pairs on 21 July. More transfers were logged at Fujairah, and at least two supertankers surfaced outside Hormuz having gone dark inside the Gulf. It is worth being precise about what has recovered. Before the war Hormuz carried around 20 million barrels a day, close to a fifth of the world's oil. The United States Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, said this week that about 13 million barrels a day are now leaving the Gulf, half through the strait and half through bypass pipelines. That puts roughly 6.5 million a day through Hormuz itself. United States Central Command said it has helped about 500 million barrels leave since early May, which works out at about 5.6 million a day over the period. Those are the figures from the people escorting the cargo, and on their own arithmetic the strait is running at something like a third of what it did. The gap between those two framings matters for anyone buying this oil. A refinery in Asia can be supplied and still be paying for the disruption, and the report shows exactly where the bill lands. At least two companies have collected cargoes outside Hormuz that were meant to be picked up weeks earlier, mostly United Arab Emirates crude bought in earlier tenders from Abu Dhabi National Oil Company for its offshore grades. Some buyers were charged fees for ships they had hired that ended up waiting. Adnoc's shipping arm has booked a tanker to take a cargo from a transfer near Sohar to Asia. The oil arrives. It arrives late, having been handled twice, and someone pays for the waiting. There is a second cost that does not appear on an invoice. Shipowners remain unwilling to enter the waterway, so producers are falling back on their own fleets or on fixed-length contracts that guarantee a hull. That is a market clearing by relationship rather than by price, and it favours national oil companies with ships of their own over buyers who rely on the open charter market. For an importer without a fleet, the question stops being what crude costs and becomes whether anyone will carry it. The opacity is itself a risk. Vessels sail dark by design, so the flow is being estimated from satellite passes, fixture data and people who will not be named. Even the satellite evidence is soft: Sentinel images do not clearly identify vessel types, and ships other than tankers transfer cargo. A market that cannot see its own supply prices the uncertainty, which is part of why Brent slid towards 80 dollars on Tuesday on signs of de-escalation and rebounded when an Iranian strike on a base in Jordan drew American retaliation. For India, which buys a large share of its crude from Gulf producers, the practical reading is that supply security and price are now two different problems. The barrels are moving, and that is what has kept the worst price scenarios from arriving. But a supply chain held together by relays, dark voyages and bilateral charters is one where a single bad week reintroduces delay without any announcement. The measure worth watching is not whether oil leaves the Gulf. It is how much of it still goes through the strait, and how long it waits. --- Originally published by India Max. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://indiamax.net/article/hormuz-oil-shuttling-picks-up.