ive waterways carry a decisive share of the world's oil and container traffic, and each one has already been disrupted in the last five years. The Strait of Hormuz moved about 20.9 million barrels a day in the first half of 2025, roughly a fifth of global oil consumption; the Strait of Malacca moved 23.2 million, about 29 percent of all maritime oil trade — and since 2021 a stuck container ship, a drought and a missile campaign have each shut one of these passages down (as of May 2026, EIA data).
Why five, when the EIA's list is longer?
The US Energy Information Administration analyzes seven chokepoints in its World Oil Transit Chokepoints series (last updated March 2026): Hormuz, Malacca, the Suez Canal and SUMED pipeline, Bab el-Mandeb, the Danish Straits, the Turkish Straits, and the Panama Canal. We cover five. The Danish Straits (4.9 million b/d in the first half of 2025) and the Turkish Straits (3.7 million b/d, Dardanelles, 1H25) are left out not because they are small — the Danish Straits rival Panama at four times the volume — but because their traffic is dominated by Russian exports, so a closure there would chiefly hit Russian export revenue rather than world trade, and neither has seen a comparable 2021–2026 disruption to learn from. The five below are the passages where high volume met an actual disruption during the last five years (EIA, March 2026).
What has each chokepoint already cost the world?
| Chokepoint | Daily oil flow, latest | The disruption, 2021–2026 | |---|---|---| | Strait of Hormuz | 20.9 million b/d, 1H25 — about 20% of global petroleum consumption and a quarter of seaborne oil (EIA) | Regional war around the Persian Gulf in 2025 and 2026; flows held, but AIS tracking from Hormuz has become unreliable since February 2026, and EIA's first-quarter 2026 estimate of 14.6 million b/d carries wide uncertainty (EIA STEO, May 2026) | | Strait of Malacca | 23.2 million b/d, 1H25 — the largest chokepoint on earth, 29% of maritime oil flows (EIA) | No closure — which is the point: the world's biggest single point of failure is one it talks about least | | Bab el-Mandeb | 4.1 million b/d in 2024, down from 9.3 in 2023 (EIA) | Attacks on shipping from late 2023 halved traffic within a year and pushed Saudi Aramco to reroute crude overland to Red Sea ports (EIA) | | Suez Canal / SUMED | 4.8 million b/d in 2024, down from 8.8 in 2023 (EIA) | The Ever Given grounded in March 2021 and blocked the canal for six days, holding up an estimated $9.6 billion of trade a day (BBC, March 2021) | | Panama Canal | 2.0–2.3 million b/d through 2025 (EIA) | Drought cut transits from 36–38 a day to 22 by December 2023, with booking slots down to 18 by February 2024; fiscal-year 2024 transits fell 29% (Panama Canal Authority advisory, October 2023; Seatrade, October 2024) |
Read the Bab el-Mandeb and Suez rows together: they are the same disruption. When ships stopped using the Red Sea, the Cape of Good Hope route — not a chokepoint at all — absorbed the difference, with its flows jumping from 6.2 million b/d in 2023 to 9.3 in 2024 (EIA, March 2026). That is what a chokepoint is for in practice: not the only road, but the shortest one, and the shortest road is where the money is made or lost.
Why does Hormuz matter more than its barrels?
Hormuz is not just the biggest single point of failure in oil; it is the one with the least honest alternatives. Around a fifth of global liquefied natural gas trade — mostly Qatari — transited it in 2024, and the crude moving through it went overwhelmingly to Asia: an estimated 84 percent of its crude and condensate in 2024, with China, India, Japan and South Korea taking about 69 percent of Hormuz crude flows (EIA, June 2025). The pipelines that could bypass it — Saudi Arabia's 5-million-b/d East-West line and the UAE's 1.8-million-b/d Fujairah pipeline — offered only about 2.6 million b/d of usable spare capacity as of 2025, a fraction of what a closure would remove (EIA, June 2025).
This is also why the 2026 numbers deserve care. EIA's Short-Term Energy Outlook of May 2026 shows a first-quarter estimate of 14.6 million b/d through Hormuz, but the agency itself flags that AIS ship-tracking signals from the strait have been especially unreliable since the end of February 2026, with volumes being revised as better data arrives (EIA STEO, May 2026). A number that rests on ships switching their transponders off is a number to hold loosely.
What does the Malacca silence tell us?
The Strait of Malacca is the world's largest chokepoint by volume — 23.2 million b/d in the first half of 2025, equivalent to 29 percent of maritime oil trade — and it got there quietly (EIA, March 2026). Crude makes up roughly 70 percent of its flows, feeding the refineries of China, Japan and South Korea; the practical alternatives, the Indonesian archipelago's Sunda and Lombok straits, add days and cost. No state actor has ever closed it, which is why it attracts a fraction of the headline attention Hormuz does. But a risk map built from headline frequency rather than volumes gets the two backwards: the least-discussed passage is the bigger single bet (EIA, March 2026).
Why can't trade simply reroute around a closure?
Distance is the cost. The Cape of Good Hope adds roughly twelve days to a Europe-bound voyage from Asia, which is why the first containerships rerouted that way in March 2021 did so only when a weeks-long Suez closure looked likely (Lloyd's List, March 2021). UNCTAD's February 2024 assessment of the Red Sea disruption found rerouting added thousands of miles and measurably raised rates on the affected trades — the cost shows up in freight prices within weeks, not years (UNCTAD, February 2024). Pipelines help only where they exist: around 2.6 million b/d of the Persian Gulf's 20-plus million b/d can bypass Hormuz by pipe, and Panama's problem is not reroutable at all — the canal's constraint is water in Gatun Lake, not politics.
What should a reader actually take from the table?
Three things, dated as of September 2026. First, disruption is no longer hypothetical: four of the five have been hit since 2021, and the total seaborne oil trade flowing through chokepoints each day — about 80 million barrels of a 104-million-b/d world supply in the first half of 2025 — sits on infrastructure that has already failed four ways in five years (EIA, March 2026). The disruptions were not simultaneous, and that is the only reason the price of oil never reflected all of them at once. Second, the binding constraint is increasingly not war but water and weather: Panama's drought cut flows as effectively as the Red Sea's missiles, and a canal that needs 200 million liters of fresh water per transiting vessel is a chokepoint whose closure risk rises with every dry season rather than with any government's decision (EIA, March 2026). Third, the largest passage is the quietest one — the Malacca question is not whether it can be closed, but that everything else gets more expensive the moment someone tries.