Strait of Hormuz: Are the Barrels Getting Out?

That is the question this page is built to answer, and the reported export figure answers it directly. Every barrel produced and not exported has to go somewhere: a domestic refinery, a power station, or storage. So exports against production, checked by the other three terms, tells you whether output is reaching buyers or accumulating behind the disruption.

The JODI-Oil World Database, which publishes what each government reports for its own crude production, imports, exports, refinery intake, direct burn and closing stocks. It is monthly and normally runs about ten to eleven weeks behind the month it covers.

Because it measured the wrong thing at exactly the moment it mattered. The index was built from AIS vessel tracks, and in a contested strait transponders are switched off, so the count reflects how many ships chose to broadcast rather than how much oil moved. On top of that, the pipelines built specifically to bypass Hormuz — Saudi Arabia’s East–West line to Yanbu on the Red Sea and ADCOP to Fujairah — never cross the counted water at all. The number fell to a few per cent of normal and read like an answer. It was removed rather than caveated.

Aramco announces an official selling price for each of its crude grades around the fifth of every month, for the following month’s loadings, quoted as a differential to the average of the Oman and Dubai benchmarks. It is on this page for two reasons. It is forward-dated, so next month’s number is known weeks before the barrel data for this month exists. And it is a published decision rather than an observation, so it cannot be broken by the disruption it describes — if the strait shut completely, Aramco would still announce the price on schedule.

As the seller’s own view of what its barrels can command against the regional benchmark. A large premium means buyers are competing for crude Aramco can supply; a discount means Aramco is pricing below the benchmark to move volume. The differential strips out the flat price, so it moves on the relative desirability of Saudi crude rather than on whether oil is generally expensive.

No, and it is not presented as one. It is a price, not a volume, and Aramco sets it partly from spot benchmark structure — the September cut was attributed to Dubai and Oman cash premiums falling during July. It tells you what the best-informed seller thinks it can charge. Only the reported export figure counts barrels.

Aramco circulates the prices to term customers and the wire services report them; there is no machine-readable feed. Each month on this page is therefore entered by hand against a published report of that month’s announcement, and every row carries the publisher and a link. A test refuses to publish the table if any row lacks a source.

Not with barrels. The alternatives are buyer-side customs filings from Japan, Korea, India and China, which no producer can suppress but which still trail the month by weeks before you add two to six weeks of voyage time between loading and arrival. Everything faster than that which is free measures something other than oil leaving the Gulf. The page states the lag as a number instead of hiding it behind a proxy.

Yes, commercially. Cargo-tracking services such as Kpler and Vortexa reconstruct loadings by combining AIS with port agent reports, satellite imagery and cargo declarations, and they model dark activity rather than being blinded by it. That closes the gap from weeks to days. It is licensed data and is not published here.

Because they are checked rather than assumed. JODI collects each term of the balance as a separate submission, so production plus imports, less exports, refinery intake and direct burn, ought to equal the change in closing stocks — but nothing forces it to. StorageCurve computes both sides and publishes the residual. For Saudi Arabia the two agree to within about two thousand barrels a day, month after month.

Fewer than the region has. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait currently file usable monthly crude flows; Iraq filed until March 2024 and then stopped; the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Qatar and Oman do not publish these crude flows to JODI at all. Of the current filers, only Saudi Arabia reports a closing crude stock level. This page names the gaps rather than filling them with estimates.

It is crude fed straight into power stations rather than refined. Saudi Arabia’s direct burn rises every summer with air-conditioning demand, and it is a genuine outlet for barrels. Ignoring it would make rising production look as though it must be going into storage when part of it is simply being burned at home.

It is the volume lifted but not shipped, and it has exactly three destinations: domestic refineries, power stations, and storage. A widening gap with flat storage means the barrels are being consumed at home. A widening gap with rising storage means they are not leaving at all, and the production increase is unavailable to the world market until it does.

A five-year seasonal benchmark answers “is this normal for the time of year”. Under an active disruption that is not the question being asked, and the recent years that would form the benchmark contain the disruption itself. The page publishes levels and flows instead.

It is refreshed daily, but the underlying data only moves when JODI publishes, normally monthly. Revisions replace earlier values rather than being appended, because governments restate their own submissions.