CENTCOM has assisted more than 660 million barrels of crude and about 1,300 commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz since early May, its spokesman, US Navy Captain Tim Hawkins, said in a statement dated Thursday 20 August12. The command had put the same figure at 500 million barrels on 29 July. Assisted means escorted or accompanied by American warships through a strait that Iran has kept contested since the spring.
Do the division. That is 160 million barrels in 22 days, a run rate of 7.27 million a day. Spread across the whole period since early May, 112 days, the average falls to 5.89 million a day. Pre-war crude and product flow ran at about 20 million a day, so the protected corridor is carrying roughly a third of what the strait used to, and carrying it faster now than when it opened.
On 20 August we published a different number for the same corridor: about 10 million barrels a day, given to Axios by two unnamed US officials. That figure sits at 1.38 times CENTCOM's recent run rate and 1.70 times the period average. Hawkins's number counts barrels assisted from a stated start date. The 10 million figure was never tied to a period, a vessel count or a named official, and it may describe corridor capacity or a single peak day rather than sustained throughput. The two cannot both be measuring the same quantity.
Neither version can be audited from outside, because no vessel-level data sits behind either one, and counting ships has already produced totals the commercial trackers could not reconcile with each other, . The figure we published on 20 August carried no name on it. This one carries a spokesman's.
