World’s tanker fleet heading to the US to fill up. By Jesús Enrique Rosas.
Hundreds of supertankers, the kind that carry two million barrels each, are currently racing toward the US Gulf Coast from every direction. …
Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and everyone panicked. … And then something happened that nobody in media seems interested in reporting, for obvious reasons. The world just… switched suppliers? Like changing your internet provider except the internet provider is the entire effing global energy economy.
Supertankers that were mid-ocean on their way to the Persian Gulf literally turned around and headed to Texas. That’s not a metaphor. Ship tracking data shows them doing U-turns in the Indian Ocean. ..
American oil exports are approaching record levels. Gulf Coast refineries are running at 95% capacity. …
Meanwhile China, which was getting 45% of its oil imports through Hormuz and paying basement prices for sanctioned Iranian crude, is now competing with Japan and Europe for the same expensive American barrels. Chinese manufacturers are already raising prices 20% on goods headed to the US.
So to summarize: Iran played its biggest card and the main result is that the United States became the world’s emergency gas station and China’s cheap energy subsidy evaporated.
MAGA:
This is either the most elaborate coincidence in the history of geopolitics… or someone planned the sequence Venezuela -> Iran -> profits!
Miad Maleki: The U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is going to send Iran broke. Over 90% of Iran’s annual trade transits the Persian Gulf. Another Cuba perhaps, brought to its knees by the US Navy?
A blockade chokes off industrial inputs, machinery, and consumer goods. Food inflation already hit 105% by February 2026. Rice prices are up 7x. This gets dramatically worse under blockade. …
The rial has already cratered from 42,000 to 1.5M per dollar. Banks are limiting withdrawals to $18-30/day. Overall inflation: 47.5%. A blockade eliminating all forex earnings pushes the rial into terminal hyperinflation. The regime issued its largest-ever banknote, 10M rials, worth about $7.
The clock is ticking on the Iranians:
Iran has ~50-55M barrels of total onshore oil storage, roughly 60% full. Spare capacity: ~20M barrels. With 1.5M bbl/day of surplus production that normally exports, storage fills in ~13 DAYS. After that, Iran must shut in wells.
Why is this very important: when mature oil wells shut down, bottom water rushes in, a process called water coning. Oil droplets get permanently trapped in rock pores. This oil can never be recovered. Iran’s fields already decline 5-8% annually. Forced shut-ins could permanently destroy 300,000-500,000 bbl/day of production capacity, that’s $9-15B/year in revenue, gone forever.
US production cannot replace all of the 20% of the world’s oil that used to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, but I’ll bet it can cover a good deal of it.
Iran’s one big card, the only economic leverage it had left, just forced every customer on earth to build a permanent detour around Iran. …
The regime traded decades of chokepoint relevance for a few weeks of headlines and a negotiating position that got worse every single day. Their oil revenue collapsed. Bypass infrastructure is going up. And the Asian buyers who used to depend on the Strait are locking in American and Russian and African supply chains that will never route back through Hormuz.