Quote Originally Posted by swaledale View Post
The primary alternative to the Red Sea route is diverting vessels around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which adds 10–14 days and roughly 3,500 nautical miles to Asia-Europe voyages. This rerouting increases fuel consumption, operating costs, and shipping rates.

There solved it for you!
Well done that solves a problem of avoiding Houthi attacks heading for the Red Sea (which havent restarted yet but are hugely likely to judging by the quadrupled war risk rates for Red Sea transits), but that does nothing to help get out of the Persian Gulf if Hormuz is closed. Look at the map next time. Youve solved a problem that was solved by the market about 2 years ago when it first arose - and isnt today's problem. Well done.

There isnt an option to prevent a trapping/blocking of ships in the Persian Gulf, which means they cant even get to the Red Sea still less consider diverting round the Cape.

At the moment Hormuz is no longer technically blocked but virtually nothing is going through it, so everything is backing up and inbound tankers are adopting a wait and see tactic. The odd vessel might try to run the straits at night AIS off and spoofing if they get desperate, or paid enough, and the Iranians are loading a few tankers at Kharg Island so they arent planning to mine anything (they need to keep exporting via dark fleet to keep economy rolling and the Chinese happy - who are the biggest market for sanctioned exports)

Normally 20 million bpd go out through Hormuz - currently bugger all apart from a few chancers maybe. Some oil stocks could be shunted down pipelines to Fujairah (via ADCOP) or Yanbu (via East-West) - but these only have capacities of 2m bpd and 0.8m bpd respectively - nothing like the capacity to handle the volumes and are probably in full use already.

So anyway, now you've solved a problem the market solved ages ago, any chance of addressing the one that I identified and matters today? An overland camel train might be inadequate.