Oil Flows Defy Iranian Threat in Strait of Hormuz with High-Stakes Workarounds

Despite the ongoing drone strikes and anti-ship missile attacks by Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, global oil flows have managed to stay up. The waterway handles one-fifth of the world's petroleum supply, but tankers are still slipping through.

The high-stakes workarounds, clandestine tanker shuttles, and drawing down dwindling stockpiles are keeping barrels moving and prices hovering near $100 a barrel. However, this fragile balance cannot last forever, and the real story isn't just that oil flows are managing to stay up, but how much pain the global economy is willing to absorb to keep those tankers moving.

Regional powers have been relying on overland pipelines to bypass the maritime bottleneck, but upgrading or rerouting infrastructure takes months. The pipelines can't absorb the entire volume of supertankers that normally queue up in the Gulf, and land-based routes aren't immune to the chaos either.