Oct 28, 2026 · 1h 37m
Hormuz disruption fractures the global oil market
A Shattered Market?: The Counterintuitive Story of the Hormuz Oil Crisis with Rory Johnston
The crisis shows how inventories, shipping constraints, refinery bottlenecks, and opaque data can reshape energy prices without an immediate global supply collapse.
- 1Higher tanker, insurance, and rerouting costs are fragmenting oil trade even as some crude exports recover.
- 2Diesel is the central pressure point because transportation, agriculture, construction, mining, and supply chains depend on it.
- 3The outlook hinges on Hormuz transits, attack intensity, inventories, and whether an expected future surplus actually arrives.
Don't miss
Rory Johnston identifies diesel as the crisis’s central pressure point, linking refinery limits to transportation, agriculture, construction, mining, and supply chains.
The brief
Rory Johnston and Nate Hagens frame the Hormuz crisis as a systems problem: crude flows have partly recovered, but shipping, insurance, and rerouting costs have fractured the market.
Inventories have absorbed accumulated production losses, helping the global economy hold up. But depleted U.S. stocks and uneven access mean wealthy buyers may outbid poorer countries.
China’s “Beijing Swing” has reduced apparent imports through lower refinery runs and stock management, illustrating how opaque data can obscure the market’s real condition.
Diesel emerges as the key pressure point because it powers transport, farming, construction, mining, and supply chains, while refineries cannot freely substitute one product for another.
Johnston’s 2027 scenarios range from conflict ending to renewed disruption amid depleted inventories; the crucial indicators are Hormuz transits, attacks, loadings, routes, and delivered costs.
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