Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is still running at a fraction of normal, four days after the 29 June verbal stand-down between the warring parties. IMF PortWatch, the Fund's vessel-tracking service, counted between 27 and 43 transits a day at the start of July against a pre-crisis baseline near 84. QatarEnergy, Qatar's state energy company, is running at roughly 35% of its 77 MTPA (million tonnes a year) nameplate.
That trails the 50%-within-a-month restart pace QatarEnergy guided when the strait first reopened. The stand-down unlocked a slow, escorted trickle rather than open lanes, which invalidated the OIES clean-reopening base case built on a smooth late-June restart. This is a follow-up on that thread, not a fresh break: the numbers confirm what the round-trip already signalled.
LNG feels the drag directly. The JKM-TTF arbitrage held near parity while two Qatari trains stayed dark, so Europe is not being outbid for the cargoes that do move; there are simply too few of them clearing the corridor. For a spreads desk that reads as a supply constraint sitting upstream of price, which no de-escalation headline resolves on its own.
