I’m looking at the map about the strait of hormuz, I’ve looked up what made it so important and I still don’t get it. I thought that the reason there is so much conflict over it, was that I assumed it looked like it was a very integral passageway for ships to get in and out of. But looking at the map again, it only goes straight to into Kuwait.

What am I missing here? Couldn’t the ships just, not bother with that part and route through elsewhere?

  • makeshiftreaper@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    22 hours ago

    So the important thing to remember is the sheer quantity of oil that needs to be moved and where it needs to be moved to. The Strait of Hormuz in 2024 had 20 million barrels of oil passing through it daily. That’s 840,000,000 gallons or 3,160,000 cubic meters, or ~1300 Olympic swimming pools each day that need to be moved. It also mostly is going to end up getting moved across oceans to be delivered to the people who need it

    Moving that much liquid by means other than boats is very difficult. Building pipelines that can move that much liquid is difficult and prone to problems. Especially considering the very harsh climate surrounding the area and even if you do have a pipeline it’s likely still going to end up in a ship because it has to cross an ocean anyway. Moving it by truck is almost logistically impossible, and trains have more problems than pipelines

    In order to have the ships big enough to move that liquid you need ports that are deep enough AND already have the infrastructure to handle ships of that size, of which all are already in the Strait. It also made sense because a lot of oil producing countries were in this area so having lots of ships in the area built efficiency

    So a whole bunch of confounding factors led to the Strait being the optimal place to move a lot of oil by ship (which the oil needed to go into anyway), however a natural choke point makes this a strategic position for countries in the area. Oil ships are slow, easy targets, and most countries could pretty cheaply take them out. Which adds to the tension in the region

    This Wendover Productions video does a good job explaining why so much oil had to go through the Strait

      • makeshiftreaper@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        20 hours ago

        Airplanes are very time efficient but not very fuel efficient. A modern 737 cargo plane holds about 52,000 lbs of cargo. To transport 3 million barrels of oil (not even 20% of the total oil we’re talking about) by plane would take about 20,000 flights daily and there are only about 13,000 737s on the planet. So ignoring the astronomical cost it would take making the process impossible to profit from, you’d have to commandeer the world’s supply of planes to do so. Also I’m almost certain that the entire middle east couldn’t handle 20,000 fully loaded cargo flights every day. It’s simply too much for their airports to handle, even if humans stopped flying

      • Rhaedas@fedia.io
        2·
        20 hours ago

        Liquid is heavy. Just comparing freight weight capacity, a 777 can carry around 100 tons, while a large freight ship carries 200,000 tons. That’s a container ship, not an oil freighter, but you see the difference. We move things that can’t take weeks to ship on a plane and pay more for it, while boat shipping is cheap if you can wait for it. And for oil there (usually) is a long queue of ships coming and going, so it doesn’t matter about the time.