Global Crude Oil Trade Flows, Chokepoints & Live Tanker Map

By raw volume it is the Strait of Malacca, at roughly 24 million barrels a day of petroleum liquids, ahead of the Strait of Hormuz at about 21 million. Hormuz is nonetheless treated as the more critical of the two, because Malacca has workable if longer detours around Indonesia while Hormuz has no meaningful bypass — almost every barrel leaving the Persian Gulf by sea must pass through it. Volume and vulnerability are different things, and the chokepoints on the map above are sized by the former.

It is the only sea route out of the Persian Gulf, so crude from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar and Iran all funnels through a channel whose shipping lanes are only a couple of miles wide at the narrowest point. About a quarter of global seaborne oil trade passed through it before 2026 (IEA), and since Iran declared it closed on 2 March 2026 flows have been sharply lower — see the dated timeline on the Strait of Hormuz page. Some pipeline capacity can bypass the strait — notably Saudi Arabia's East-West line to the Red Sea and the UAE's line to Fujairah — but it can carry only a fraction of normal transit volumes, which is why any threat to Hormuz moves the crude price immediately.

It depends far more on how long a disruption is expected to last than on the barrels missing on the day. Traders price the risk of future shortage, so prices often jump on the threat of closure and give the gain back once traffic reroutes. The 2024 Red Sea diversions are the clearest recent example: rather than oil going undelivered, tankers rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding roughly ten days and considerable cost to the voyage but keeping the barrels flowing. Freight rates and regional price differentials usually react more sharply than the headline benchmark.

Not from this map, and not from public AIS in general. AIS broadcasts a ship's position, but the destination field is typed in by the crew and is frequently vague, stale or simply wrong, and the load port is not transmitted at all. Reconstructing genuine cargo-level origin-to-destination flows means combining AIS with draft changes, port records and terminal data — that is a commercial product from firms such as Kpler and Vortexa. This page deliberately shows live positions and aggregate flows rather than inventing route lines it cannot verify.

No. They are drawn straight between broad origin and destination regions to show direction and rough scale, with width proportional to volume. Real tankers follow sea lanes that curve around coastlines and through canals. The arrows are illustrative of trade structure, not navigational paths, and the underlying basemap is a rough outline for orientation rather than an accurate coastline.

The transit volumes come from EIA estimates for approximately 2023 and are rounded, so treat them as indicative of scale rather than as live measurements. Chokepoint traffic does shift year to year — Bab el-Mandeb and the Cape of Good Hope in particular moved substantially after the 2024 Red Sea security diversions. The live vessel map above is genuinely real time; the flow and chokepoint layer is a curated reference dataset.