Strait of Hormuz Crisis Enters Critical Phase
Two oil tankers exploded and stopped moving in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday morning after entering what Iran‘s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps described as an unsafe southern corridor, the same day Yemen‘s Houthi forces declared a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia that directly threatens the only significant pipeline route Gulf oil producers have used to bypass the closed strait since February. Taken together, both developments threaten to eliminate what little redundancy remained in global energy supply chains after nearly five months of the most severe oil chokepoint crisis since the 1970s.
The Strait of Hormuz has been a focal point of international tensions since the war began on February 28. Before the conflict, the strait handled roughly 88 commercial vessel transits per day and carried approximately 20 million barrels of oil — about 20 percent of global seaborne crude and 20 percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas. The World Bank’s April 2026 Commodity Markets Outlook described the resulting supply shock as the largest on record, with an initial reduction of roughly 10 million barrels per day from global markets.
Global Oil Supply Chains Under Threat
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, speaking Sunday, acknowledged that current volumes from the Arabian Gulf region run “a little under 14 million barrels a day” — roughly two-thirds of pre-war throughput — confirming that one-third of pre-war Gulf oil volumes have been stripped from global supply chains and have not recovered. Brent crude climbed two percent to above $90 a barrel on Monday.
The strait is not simply congested or disrupted. It is functioning as a conditional toll road with an unreliable enforcement architecture. The IRGC operates four distinct methods of control: kinetic attacks by boats, missiles, and drone boats; naval mines seeded across the southern channel; GNSS satellite spoofing that corrupts navigational data for vessels attempting to plot their own course; and AIS jamming that removes ships from public tracking systems entirely.
Mine Clearance Operations Underway
One detail rarely foregrounded in coverage of the Hormuz crisis deserves attention from anyone with a vessel in the region: Iran reportedly lost track of mines it planted in the strait. The U.S. began mine clearance operations on April 11, and mine-coordination discussions formed a central element of the June 17 U.S.–Iran Memorandum of Understanding — with underwater drone clearance expected to take 40 to 50 days, a timeline that has already lapsed without resolution.
At the same time, AIS — the Automatic Identification System that transmits a vessel’s position, speed, and identity via VHF radio and is mandated by the International Maritime Organization for all commercial vessels over 300 gross tons — offers no security against spoofing or jamming. Actors can manipulate AIS data by injecting signals into the data stream, jamming VHF frequencies, or using GNSS spoofing to push false position data into a vessel’s navigation system. Iran used AIS spoofing to seize a British oil tanker in 2019; the same techniques are now deployed at scale in the strait.
The products tanker Kavomaleas — a vessel Bloomberg separately confirmed had halted in the strait off Oman’s Musandam Peninsula on Monday — had turned off its AIS transponder before attempting to transit, a tactic increasingly common among vessels trying to avoid Iranian forces’ unpredictable enforcement.
Original Article: Tankers Explode in Hormuz as Houthis Cut Saudi Arabia’s Only Bypass Route — Techtimes