The Strait of Hormuz Is Reopening. The Oil Won't Flow Back Overnight.

The war is over. The chokepoint isn't.

Markets relaxed when the Geneva memorandum was signed, ending a closure that ran 107 days and cut liquefied natural gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz by roughly 99 percent and crude tanker transits by about 95 percent. But a strait does not reopen the day a memo is signed. What comes next is logistics, and logistics run on weeks and months, not headlines.

Step one: find and clear about 20 drifting mines

Iran laid an estimated 20-plus naval mines, and some have drifted from where they were placed. That means crews have to search a wide area, not just clear known spots. Maritime security sources put a usable clearance at 40 to 50 days using minesweepers, sonar, and underwater drones. The Pentagon's own internal estimate runs up to six months for a comprehensive sweep, even with three dedicated minesweeping vessels already in the region. The optimistic political line of "a couple of weeks" is rosier than even the operational floor.

Step two: the insurance gate

Physically clearing the lanes is not the same as ships sailing through them. War-risk underwriters want independent confirmation that the strait is free of mines before they will cover tankers again. Until premiums normalize and owners trust the route, the ships stay away. Stranded tankers that pulled out during the closure also have to reposition. The shooting stopping is step one of many.

Where does the missing oil come from? Mostly, it doesn't.

Roughly 20 million barrels a day normally move through Hormuz, about a fifth of the world's oil. During the closure, analysts estimate about 11.8 million barrels a day was shut in across six Gulf producers, leaving a global hole near 9 million barrels a day even after every workaround. There are three levers, and none of them closes the gap:

• Bypass pipelines are the only physical reroute. Saudi Arabia's East-West line moves up to 5 million barrels a day and the UAE's Abu Dhabi-to-Fujairah line about 1.5 million. Combined, roughly 6.5 million barrels a day against a 9 million hole.
• OPEC spare capacity barely moved. The group added just 206,000 barrels a day in its March 1 decision. Saudi Arabia and the UAE cannot max out instantly without damaging their reservoirs, and much of their oil ships through Hormuz anyway.
• Strategic reserves are the actual bridge. The US and allied countries are drawing down their reserves at an accelerating pace, reportedly about double the rate originally modeled.

The buffer is at a 40-year low, and it isn't a tank

That bridging draw is coming out of a reserve already near its limit. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve sits around 349 million barrels, about half its 714 million barrel design capacity and roughly a 40-year low. And it is not a fuel tank. The oil is stored in underground salt caverns created by dissolving rock with fresh water. Every drawdown injects more water to push the oil out, which erodes and deforms the caverns. They shrink by about 2 million barrels a year, and some can only be fully emptied once. So the usable floor sits well above zero, and you cannot simply drain the reserve and refill it like a tank.

We track the weekly level on the SPR page and the full petroleum picture on the oil dashboard.

What to watch

Even at the optimistic end of forecasts, energy flows through the strait are unlikely to exceed half of prewar levels in the first month, with a full recovery stretching toward late 2026 or beyond. The tell is not the peace headline. It is the weekly EIA reserve print and the war-risk insurance rate. Both will keep moving long after the shooting stops, and the emergency buffer that is supposed to handle exactly this moment is being spent fastest right when it is thinnest.