Hormuz Reopening Risks Turning Oil Shortage Into Glut Maritime Activity Reports, Inc. Ron Bousso June 29, 2026 © Asendar1 / Adobe Stock Crude prices may be back near levels seen before the Iran war, but the surge in oil exports from the Middle East following the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is creating a chaotic market that could take months to settle. The steep slide in Brent crude LCOc1 back to pre-war levels of around $73 a barrel following the U.S.-Iran interim deal might, at first glance, suggest business as usual has returned to the world’s most important oil and gas hub. The narrow waterway, which once carried about a fifth of global oil and gas, had been effectively paralysed by conflict for more than 100 days. But beneath the surface, the market is anything but orderly. What looks like normality is a system trying to reboot all at once. First, there’s the race to liberate trapped volumes. Dozens of tankers stranded inside the Gulf during the war have rushed to leave in recent days. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said flows briefly exceeded pre-war levels of around 20 million barrels per day, though ship-tracking data suggests overall traffic remains far below the roughly 125 daily crossings seen before the conflict. Some vessels appear to be disabling tracking systems during transit, further clouding the picture. Whatever the precise numbers, one thing is clear: more Middle Eastern oil is hitting the market. But clearing outbound cargo is only half the equation. Inbound tankers are needed to load crude sitting in onshore storage, a key step in allowing producers to restart fields and refineries shut during the war. Without that inflow of vessels, the recovery in supply cannot proceed smoothly. This dynamic is particularly acute for producers such as Kuwait, Iraq, Bahrain and Qatar, which have few, if any alternative export routes. The constraint should be short-lived. Consultancy Rystad Energy estimates that shut-in production across the Gulf fell