Washington and Tehran describe different waters, and the Brent curve prices a short closure
The US says the southern lanes off Oman are open; Iran says shipping must sail north past Larak Island, which the US bombed on Sunday. Traders are betting the disruption ends by spring.
The Trump administration insists southern shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz, close to Omani shores, are open and safe to transit, while Iran insists all vessels coordinate with its military and use a northern passage close to its Larak Island, CBS News reported. Larak is where the US military said it struck rocket launchers and sea drones on Sunday 30 August. The Washington Post reported that the strike hit Iranian rocket launchers as Iranian forces were preparing to disperse sea mines into the waterway, according to a US Navy captain; a US official told The Jerusalem Post it was the first US strike on Iran in several weeks, and Axios reported the rockets were armed with sea mines. The IRGC-run outlet Fars News reported that witnesses heard the explosion. CNN noted the strike came days after Trump declared the strait free of mines.
The traffic series is unambiguous even where the politics is not. Al Jazeera’s 20 August data analysis found roughly 130 ships sailed through Hormuz each day before the war began on 28 February, against 236 in total over 19 days in August 2026 — 12.4 a day, a collapse of about 90 percent. The waterway carried a fifth of the world’s oil and LNG before the war. On price, publisher and instrument diverge: CBS put Brent back over $90, up about 1.4 percent on the day and more than 30 percent above pre-war levels; Trading Economics logged $91.28 on 1 September; Oilprice.com’s futures board had front-month November Brent at $96.55, up 2.03 percent, with the curve falling to $93.01 in December, $89.78 in January and $83.54 by April 2027.
Assessment: The forward curve is the honest indicator on the desk. Roughly $13 of backwardation between November and April is the market saying Hormuz is severely disrupted and will not stay that way — a testable prediction, unlike either government’s account of which lane is safe. Distrust three things circulating in the price coverage: Trading Economics' unsourced line about a supertanker hitting two naval mines, which carries no vessel name, flag or date and appears nowhere in the maritime trade press; NBC’s reference to a “steady drop in oil prices this month”, which is contradicted by every board we checked and is probably stale evergreen text; and Straits.live’s transit counts, which come from a private aggregator, not a wire.