Find Iran on a globe and run your finger down its south coast until you hit a kink in the map, where the Persian Gulf narrows into a Z-shape before opening into the Gulf of Oman. That kink is the Strait of Hormuz.
It is about 33 km (21 mi) wide at its narrowest. The shipping lane itself is tighter: two channels roughly 3 km each — one inbound, one outbound — separated by a 3 km buffer. The whole working corridor is narrower than the Channel between England and France.
Through this slot, every single day, the world ships about 20 million barrels of oil.
The US Energy Information Administration puts the 2024 average at 20 million barrels per day — roughly 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption and more than a quarter of all seaborne oil trade on Earth. Around 20% of global LNG also passes through, almost all of it from Qatar.
The destination map is striking. 84% of the crude leaving the strait goes to Asia. China, India, Japan and South Korea together take 69% of it. China alone receives roughly a third of its oil this way. The United States, by contrast, imports just 0.5 million b/d through Hormuz — 7% of its crude imports and 2% of its petroleum consumption.
What makes the chokepoint genuinely existential is that there is almost no way around it. Saudi Arabia and the UAE operate bypass pipelines, but the EIA estimates only about 2.6 million b/d of spare capacity — barely a tenth of what flows through. Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain have no land route at all.
Shut the strait, and you don't just inconvenience the region. You take roughly a fifth of the world's oil off the market overnight, with no quick substitute. Saudi Aramco's chief warned this month that a prolonged closure would push gasoline and jet fuel supplies to "critically low levels" by summer.
The world likes to think of oil as a planetary commodity moving fluidly between thousands of buyers and sellers. In practice, a fifth of it spends every day funnelling through a corridor narrow enough to see across.
When chokepoints get this thin, geography stops being a backdrop and starts being a lever.