Strait of Hormuz, April 2026: the state of a blocked chokepoint

The situation as of 10 April

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched an air campaign against Iran, during which the supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed. In retaliation, Iran targeted vessels, laid mines and banned passage through the strait through the voice of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In normal times, about 20% of the world’s oil and a comparable share of liquefied natural gas transit through Hormuz, most of it bound for Asia (EIA, IEA).

The effect was immediate. Traffic first fell by about 70%, and more than 150 vessels dropped anchor on either side of the strait; before the war, about 138 vessels transited it each day. Iran opened its own route north of Larak island and made passage subject to authorisation, charging tolls of up to $2m per vessel, settled in yuan according to Lloyd’s List. As of 10 April, a ceasefire was announced but remained conditional, and US-Iran talks were expected in Islamabad.

The oil shock, in numbers

The Brent price illustrates the scale of the rupture. After an average of about $71 a barrel in February, it rose to $103 on average in March, $32 more, and the daily price reached nearly $128 on 2 April (EIA). In its Short-Term Energy Outlook of 7 April, the EIA raised its 2026 Brent forecast to $96 a barrel, against $78.84 a month earlier, and its WTI forecast to $87.41 against $73.61, anticipating a peak at $115 in the second quarter. The production outages in the Gulf, estimated at 7.5 million barrels a day in March, were expected to peak around 9.1 million in April according to the same source. The International Energy Agency called the event the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market, with Gulf countries cutting their production by at least 10 million barrels a day.

The shock absorbers

Faced with the rupture, strategic stocks were mobilised. On 11 March, the IEA member countries decided to release 400 million barrels from their emergency reserves, an unprecedented scale. The OECD’s emergency stocks count about 1.25 billion barrels held by governments and a further 600 million of industry obligation. On the US side, a sale from the strategic reserve was announced on 11 March, together with a 60-day Jones Act waiver to allow foreign vessels to carry products between US ports. The EIA then forecast a retail gasoline price peak around $4.30 a gallon in April, and diesel above $5.80. The IEA warned, however, that these reserves remain a stopgap, whose effect depends on how long the blockade lasts.

The transmission to inflation

This energy shock feeds directly into US consumer prices, of which energy is a volatile component. That is the subject of a separate piece on the return of US inflation.

Update, since April

The April ceasefire did not hold. The Islamabad talks collapsed on 12 April, and on 13 April the United States imposed a naval blockade of Iranian ports, maintained until 29 May. Brent peaked at $117 on average in April, its highest monthly level since June 2022, before easing to $107 in May (EIA). The war ended in mid-June: a memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran was signed on 17 June, opening the reopening of the strait and a sixty-day toll-free passage period. For the detail of the way out of the crisis, see the normalisation scenarios; for the big picture, the anatomy of the economic earthquake.

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Primary sources: EIA, Short-Term Energy Outlook (April, May and June 2026) and 7 April 2026 release; IEA, Oil Market Report (March 2026); Congressional Research Service, “Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz”; Lloyd’s List; Kpler; CNBC.