What is inside the freight spike
The benchmark daily rate for a very large crude carrier running from the Middle East to China has approached 800,000 dollars. In the same week, chartering a supertanker from the US Gulf Coast to Asia cost a lump sum of 29.5 million dollars per run, before war-risk fees or unexpected delays. Saudi Arabia has begun routing some cargoes out through the northern Red Sea and Egypt's Mediterranean ports.[1]
The constraint lifting those numbers sits in distance: the longer routes tie ships up for longer, shrink the pool of available tonnage and push the rate up. The shipbroker Fearnleys, in its report for the week ended 9 September, wrote that the list of available vessels had grown so tight that breaching the 400 mark on the Worldscale freight index for a prompt Fujairah run would surprise no one. Alex Grant, Equinor's global head of crude, products and liquids trading, said several bottlenecks were binding at once and that the strain was showing up in shipping rates.[1]
Two bills for the volume crossing the strait
The size of the squeeze that freight is measuring shows up in the volume crossing the strait. One bank's analysis puts oil flows through Hormuz at 6 million barrels a day now and has them rising to about 8 million barrels a day by the end of 2026 and to 9.5 million barrels a day by the middle of 2027. Other estimates based on flow tracking point to roughly 10 million barrels a day of crude and products at present. Both figures are half or less of the 19 million to 20 million barrels a day that transited before the war.[2]
The volume stuck behind the strait is written into two separate bills. Crude that cannot cross takes the longer route and the bill appears in freight; liquefied natural gas that cannot cross is replaced by coal. The International Energy Agency's mid-year coal update expects global coal demand to rise 1.2 per cent in 2026 to a record 8.94 billion tonnes, because the blockage lifted gas prices and generators ran coal-fired units harder. One physical constraint surfaces as the price of tonnage on one side and as a choice of fuel on the other.[1], [2], [3]
Where to look
This column wrote on 6 September that the OPEC+ quota does not measure the diesel reaching Europe, and that route and refining capacity do. That freight spike is the next link in that argument: the constraint has moved from a production decision to carrying capacity, and the ship now sets the price.[4], [1]
The threshold to watch is concrete: if the flow through Hormuz stays near 6 million barrels a day, the tightness in the list of available vessels should become visible when the 400 mark on the Worldscale index is breached for a prompt Fujairah run. If the flow climbs towards 8 million barrels a day and the long routes shorten, the tonnage pool widens and freight retreats; these lines would then need revising.[1], [2]