Two rival datasets put Hormuz traffic near a tenth of normal. The White House says thirty ships

Al Jazeera, working from Kpler data, counted six vessels crossing the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday 2 September, eleven on Tuesday 1 September and five on Monday 31 August, for a ten-day average of thirteen a day; other tracking services showed a similar pattern. Trump has said the United States is helping around thirty ships cross the waterway daily. IMF/UN PortWatch recorded six transits on 30 August against a pre-crisis baseline of roughly eighty-five a day. The one dataset that might have cut the other way does not: United Against Nuclear Iran, citing the Joint Maritime Information Center, counts 877 transits between 18 June and 2 September and 1,490 since the war began, with a peak of 54 on 24 June. That works out at eleven to twelve a day — close to Kpler. UANI is an advocacy organisation with a declared position on Iran, and JMIC is a US-led cell; both should be read accordingly. Neither supports thirty.

The commercial picture is of a corridor used furtively rather than freely. Windward’s daily intelligence note for 6 September recorded four vessels — two tankers, a bulk carrier and a liquid-service ship — transiting with AIS switched off, one inbound and three outbound, including a 340-metre dark tanker of VLCC class proceeding outbound at reduced speed and trailing a 16-kilometre surface sheen. UANI reported on 1 September that US forces had redirected 84 commercial vessels attempting to run the blockade, disabled three that did not comply and boarded two. Price has followed. Trading Economics put Brent at $96.82 on 6 September, up 0.56 percent, 15.88 percent higher on the month and 46.65 percent year on year, with a weekly gain of nearly nine percent — its strongest since mid-July — attributed to the resumption of US-Iran strikes. Forbes Advisor marked Brent at $94.71 on 4 September; the gap is instrument and timestamp, not disagreement.

The Energy Information Administration’s Short-Term Energy Outlook of 11 August, completed on 6 August, forecast Brent averaging around $85 a barrel, and said it had raised its estimate of shut-in Middle East crude production “due to continued severe constraints on Strait of Hormuz transits.” The next STEO is due Wednesday 9 September: the first official US government re-forecast since the 1 and 5 September strikes, with the benchmark running roughly $12 above the standing number. Iraqi crude exports averaged 2.35 million barrels a day in August, mostly by southern routes through the strait. With 5 and 6 September non-trading days, Monday’s open is the first market verdict on the tanker strikes.

Assessment: The interesting thing is not that the thirty-a-day figure is high. It is that the two datasets most likely to be pulled in opposite directions by their sponsors — a commercial tracker used by Al Jazeera, and a US-led naval cell republished by an anti-Iran advocacy group — land within two vessels of each other. When belligerent-adjacent counting agrees with neutral counting, the outlier is the political statement, not the data. Wednesday’s STEO is the harder test: a federal agency has to write down a number that either ratifies the $96 market or implies it expects the strait to reopen. Watch which assumption it revises, transits or price.