U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright raised eyebrows in energy markets Wednesday when he said more oil exports left the Middle East on Monday—between the Strait of Hormuz and alternative routes—than before the beginning of the Iran war.
While crude oil exports have indeed risen in recent weeks—at least until an escalation of U.S. and Iranian attacks on Tuesday that slowed exports yet again—analytics firms that track tanker traffic rebutted Wright’s claims.
As the U.S. has worked to carve out a path for oil tankers that hews closer to Oman, more oil shippers are using smaller tankers to move through the narrow Strait of Hormuz and then transferring their volumes to larger tankers in the broader Arabian Sea, a process called ship-to-ship transfers.
That process can be time consuming over days, and it appears that Wright is adding up transfers over multiple days into a single day, said Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, jokingly calling it “mathemagics.”
Here’s what Wright initially had to say during an interview with CNBC:
