Before the war, 40 tankers carrying 20 million barrels of crude oil and refined petroleum products traversed the Strait of Hormuz every day. This week Iran has allowed just a handful of tankers to slip through Hormuz, including ships flagged to India and China. Amid oil rationing and shortages, which countries are most in danger of winning the race to empty?

This week analyst Mike Haigh and his team of commodities market analysts at Societe Generale figure that for now the trickle through the Strait will average 500,000 barrels per day, on Iran’s whim.

Incredibly, much of the rest of the pent-up oil is still getting to market, or at least filling up storage tanks. The Saudis have turned to their long-planned and expanded East-West pipeline, which will be pushed to its limits in carrying 7 million barrels per day to the Red Sea port at Yanbu. Likewise, the United Arab Emirates has been able to move some oil east around the Strait via pipeline to the port of Fujairah, though Iran has reportedly attacked that infrastructure.

Analysts at Jefferies see 6.7 million barrels per day of Gulf oil production now shut-in. Energy Aspects figures that the Hormuz-related outages will peak at 10 million bpd, with total OPEC crude oil production now down 7 million bpd to 22.3 million. That’s 7% of the world’s daily crude oil diet of 100 million barrels per day.

The United States, as the world’s biggest oil and natural gas producer, is........

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