For six months the entire conversation about oil logistics has been about one strait, and you can hardly blame anyone for that. Hormuz has been effectively closed since late February, when the war between Iran and the U.S. and Israel started, and the EIA reckons only 4.9 million barrels a day of crude and liquids made it through in the second quarter. In the last quarter of 2025 that number was 21.6 million. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said in June that management of the strait “will never return to the way it was before the war,” which is about as clear as Tehran has been on anything lately.But 16.7 million barrels a day don't vanish off the map…They get rerouted, and rerouting oil means shoving it through some other narrow place that was already busy. Brent was around $91.62 on Wednesday and WTI at $85.56, and a fair slice of that is just the cost of the detour.Set OilPrice.com as a preferred source in Google here.So the more useful question right now isn't what's happening in Hormuz. It's what's happening everywhere else. There are five other chokepoints that matter, and every one of them is currently doing something. They're below in rough order of how likely they are to ruin somebody's quarter, starting with the one that already is.The Houthis followed Saudi Arabia to the Red SeaWhen Hormuz shut, Riyadh did the obvious thing and swung its export machine 800 miles west. Crude that used to load on the Gulf started moving instead through the East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea coast. It worked, spectacularly. Yanbu was loading around 240,000 barrels a day this time last year. By June it was doing 3.5 million.All of that has to leave through the Bab el-Mandeb, an 18-mile gap between Yemen and Djibouti at the bottom of the Red Sea, and the volumes show it. The strait carried 4.2 million bpd through the first half of 2025 and 8.1 million in the second quarter of this year. It essentially doubled overnight.Then, on July 20, the Houthis declared a maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia.They don't hold the Yemeni coastline at the strait itself…they hold ground roughly 100 kilometers away, which has turned out to be plenty, and they've since claimed strikes on Saudi tankers and on Aramco facilities at Jizan and Yanbu. Traffic responded predictably. Traceable transits fell to 200 in the week of Aug. 3, the lowest weekly count in a year, and a growing share of what still moves has switched off its transponders and gone dark.Two China-crewed tankers loaded Saudi crude at Yanbu last month and cleared the strait untouched. Windward's read on the pattern: “Enforcement is calibrated to crew and ownership, not cargo.” The blockade isn't really about the oil. It's about whose ship it's sitting on.Going around means the Cape of Good Hope, which adds about 3,500 nautical miles and 10 to 14 days. Reuters costed one Saudi cargo sent the long way at roughly $1.6 million in extra fuel plus another $1 million in canal fees. Riyadh can also push barrels north through Suez and the Sumed pipeline, but as the EIA puts it, those routes “take longer, are more expensive, and are more limited in capacity.” Which is the polite way of saying there isn't a good answer.The Bosphorus is wide open and it doesn't matterHere's a chokepoint that isn't blocked, isn't threatened, and is failing anyway.The Turkish Straits, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles together, moved 4.1 million barrels a day last quarter against 3.7 million in the first half of 2025. More than 40,000 ships went through the Bosphorus last year, threading a channel that narrows to 750 meters with a city of 16 million on both banks. Turkey couldn't close it to merchant traffic even if it wanted to. The 1936 Montreux Convention guarantees free passage in peacetime, and Ankara's authority extends only to warships and safety rules. It has leaned hard on the second, banning single-hull tankers since 2008 and keeping anything over 200 meters out at night, but the passage stays open.The problem is what sits at the other end of it…Ukrainian drones have been working over Novorossiysk for months. The Sheskharis terminal there, which had been moving about 650,000 barrels a day and roughly a fifth of Russia's seaborne crude, sat idle from July 21. The Caspian Pipeline Consortium terminal next door handles more than 80 percent of Kazakhstan's exports and close to 2 percent of world supply, and it took enough hits that Kazakhstan started cutting production. The Greek-managed tanker Skiros was struck on Aug. 16 after loading there. In early August Turkey quietly began slowing transit permits for Novorossiysk-bound ships, which is entirely Montreux-compliant and also unmistakably a message.For Caspian crude there's a real bypass in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which skips the Black Sea altogether. For anything loading at a Russian Black Sea port there is nothing. No alternative route, no workaround, no long way around. That's what makes a chokepoint a chokepoint, and it's why Turkey has spent a decade talking about Canal Istanbul, a $25 billion parallel waterway that would sit outside Montreux and hand Ankara an actual dial to turn. It still isn't built.Panama's problem is rainEvery other entry on this list is a story about people. Panama's is about weather, which at least makes it the only one you can forecast.The canal is a freshwater system perched 85 feet above sea level, and every ship that transits drains tens of millions of gallons of Gatun Lake out to sea. When it rains, that's fine. When it doesn't, the authority starts telling ships to ride higher in the water, and a ship riding higher is a ship leaving cargo on the dock.It hasn't been raining. Gatun sat just above 84 feet in early August, down close to a foot from July, with the canal projecting around 83 by September. Maximum draft has been cut five times since the summer started: 49.5 feet on July 3, then 49 on July 24, 48.5 on Aug. 15, 48 on Aug. 26 and 47.5 from Sept. 3. NOAA puts the odds of this El Nino reaching very strong status by late 2026 at 81 percent.Volumes are actually up, 3.2 million bpd last quarter against 2.3 million in the first half of 2025, though the cargo mix matters. Panama is a products and LPG route rather than a crude route, mostly U.S. Gulf barrels heading to Asia and the Pacific coast of South America. Around 5 percent of world maritime commerce moves through, and fiscal 2025 was a strong year at 13,404 transits and $5.7 billion in revenue.The figure that actually matters isn't the draft, though. It's daily transit slots, still holding at 36. Draft restrictions cost money. Slot cuts cost schedules, and schedules are what send ships to Suez or around the Horn instead. During the 2023-24 drought the canal went to 24 slots and then 18, drafts fell to 44 feet, Gatun bottomed at 79.6, and carriers left. Panama knows how that goes, which is why it's building the Rio Indio reservoir. That's $1.6 billion, and it won't hold a drop before 2031, so it does nothing for this El Nino.The workarounds aren't much better. Suez has its own problems right now, Cape Horn adds something like 8,000 nautical miles, and the U.S. rail land bridge is a fine answer for containers and no answer at all for a products tanker.Denmark's hands were tied in 1857Roughly 60 percent of Russia's seaborne crude leaves through three narrow channels between the Baltic and the North Sea. The Great Belt is the deep one that big tankers use, with the Øresund and the Little Belt taking the rest, and all three belong to a NATO member with excellent reasons to want a say over what passes through.The Copenhagen Convention, signed in 1857 back when Denmark was still charging tolls and irritating every maritime power in Europe, guarantees free passage and bars Copenhagen from levying fees. Of the five chokepoints here, the one administered by an EU and NATO government is the one whose owner has the least legal room to act.The Danish Maritime Authority counted 292 voyages by EU-sanctioned tankers through its waters in 2025. Around 175 shadow fleet tankers come through every month, averaging 17 years old, routinely sailing with transponders off and carrying insurance that wouldn't cover a fraction of a real spill. Copenhagen's answer has been environmental and port-state inspections at the Skagen anchorage and sulfur sniffers bolted to the Great Belt bridge. Environment Minister Magnus Heunicke's line is that these ships “pose a particular risk to our marine environment,” which is the diplomatic version of what everyone actually thinks of them.Volumes have barely moved, 4.7 million bpd last quarter against 4.9 million in the first half of 2025, and there's no alternative worth discussing. The Kiel Canal takes small vessels. Druzhba is mostly shut to the EU. Oil loaded at Primorsk or Ust-Luga goes through Danish water or it doesn't go.Which is why the real risk here isn't a closure. It's a wreck. A serious spill in a shallow, enclosed sea like the Baltic runs into the tens of billions of euros with cleanup measured in decades, and December 2024 already showed what that looks like, when two shadow fleet tankers broke apart in a Black Sea storm and produced the worst spill that region has seen this century. Nobody wants a rerun of that in the Great Belt in February.The quiet one is the big oneThe largest oil chokepoint on the planet isn't Hormuz and never was. It's the Strait of Malacca, which pinches down to 1.7 miles at the Phillips Channel near Singapore and carried 23.2 million barrels a day through the first half of 2025. Something like 94,000 vessels transited in 2024, hauling roughly a quarter of everything traded on earth.Last quarter it carried 16.6 million.That drop is the cleanest illustration anywhere of what closing Hormuz actually did, because most of the crude crossing Malacca started life in the Gulf and had already been through Hormuz once. Shut a strait in the Persian Gulf and you throttle another one 4,000 miles away without going anywhere near it.Nobody administers Malacca. Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore manage it between them, there's no canal authority and no toll, and this spring Indonesia's finance minister floated the idea of introducing one, apparently taking his cue from Iran doing the same thing in Hormuz. Kuala Lumpur and Singapore shot it down and Jakarta backed off within days.The alternatives are the genuinely interesting part, because Indonesia owns those too. Sunda is the short way around and it's also shallow, hazardous and sitting directly under Krakatoa, which rules it out for a loaded VLCC. Lombok is deep enough for anything afloat and costs seven to eight days and roughly $472,000 a voyage, according to RSIS research. So the country that controls a chunk of the main route also controls both bypasses, a position no other littoral state on this list enjoys.Nothing is threatening Malacca right now. Piracy is up, 108 incidents across the Malacca and Singapore straits in 2025, a 74 percent jump and the worst in 19 years, but nearly all of it is opportunistic theft off slow-moving ships rather than anything strategic. The exposure that matters belongs to China, which brings around 80 percent of its imported oil through here and has been openly nervous about it since Beijing coined the phrase Malacca dilemma two decades ago.16.6 million barrels a day is an enormous amount of oil riding on nothing going wrong.Suez, the Cape, and the one nobody wants to talk aboutSuez moved 5.8 million bpd last quarter and revenue reached $1.26 billion, up 13 percent, but functionally it's the northern half of the Bab el-Mandeb problem rather than a separate one. The Cape of Good Hope isn't a chokepoint at all, which is precisely the point: 9.4 million bpd went around it last quarter and nobody on earth is capable of closing it. It's the release valve, and the toll it charges is time.Then there's the Taiwan Strait, which carries no meaningful oil volume of its own but sits square on the route from Malacca up to Japan and South Korea. Not a problem today, but it's the one that would make everything above look minor.And none of this is theoretical anymore… Saudi Arabia rebuilt its entire export logistics around a pipeline to the Red Sea and got blockaded there within weeks. Kazakhstan is cutting production because of drone strikes on a terminal in Russia. Panama is rationing water. Denmark is measuring sulfur in ship exhaust from a bridge because a treaty from 1857 left it nothing else to work with.So the next time a finance minister floats a transit fee, or a canal authority publishes a draft advisory, or somebody's navy suddenly needs more patrol boats in a place nobody was talking about last week, this is usually the reason.By Michael Kern for Oilprice.comMore Top Reads From Oilprice.comLow Rivers, High Stakes: Europe's Nuclear Cooling CrisisChina's New Five-Year Plan Preps the Nation for Peak OilIEA: Southeast Asia Needs Grid Investment to Nearly Quadruple by 2050