The World Is Losing 100 Million Barrels of Oil a Week. The CEO of Saudi Aramco Put a Number on It.

Most supply chain teams have been tracking the Strait of Hormuz closure as a shipping story. This week, the CEO of the world's largest oil company put the first definitive number on the energy damage, and it reframes the entire picture.

Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said on the company's first-quarter earnings call that the oil market is losing 100 million barrels of supply for every week the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Just two to five ships are passing through Hormuz daily right now, compared with around 70 vessels before the war began. The cumulative impact is already historic. The total net loss so far stands at around 880 million barrels once rerouted flows and strategic reserve releases are accounted for, with the gross figure passing 1 billion barrels. Nasser called it "the largest energy supply shock the world has ever experienced." 

The timeline attached to that statement is what should concern every procurement and logistics team planning beyond this quarter.

The 2027 problem

"If the Strait of Hormuz opens today, it will still take months for the market to rebalance, and if its opening is delayed by a few more weeks, then normalisation will last into 2027," Nasser said. Crude prices jumped during the first quarter from the mid $60s in early February to more than $100 a barrel in March as Iran's shutdown of the key waterway sparked a global energy crisis. 

The reason reopening the strait does not instantly fix the market is structural. Most of the world's spare oil production capacity is located in the Persian Gulf, meaning it is not available to help address the shortfall. Global stockpiles are running dangerously low, with companies and governments dipping into storage to meet demand that the closed strait cannot supply.

Over 600 tankers are stuck inside the Persian Gulf, and another 240 are waiting outside on the other side of the strait. The global tanker fleet is, in Nasser's words, "mixed up," with vessels in the wrong places. Reopening the strait does not immediately fix that. Tankers need to be repositioned, ports need to clear backlogs, and refineries that have been running on degraded inputs need time to normalise output. 

What workarounds exist and where they fall short

Aramco has not been passive. The company ramped up its East-West pipeline, which transits the Arabian Peninsula and bypasses the Strait of Hormuz entirely, to its maximum capacity of 7 million barrels per day. Of that volume, about 2 million barrels go to refineries on Saudi Arabia's western coast, while the remaining 5 million are available for export. 

Seven million barrels per day is a meaningful buffer. It is not a replacement for a waterway that moved 20 million barrels per day before the war. Roughly 20% of the world's oil and LNG normally passes through the Strait of Hormuz. In 2024, 84% of crude oil and condensate shipments through the strait were destined for Asian markets, with China receiving a third of its oil via the strait. The pipeline cannot replicate that volume, and it cannot move LNG at all. 

The exposure for European and Asian companies

The energy shock is not arriving as a single event. It is arriving as a sustained, compounding cost pressure across every oil-derived input in manufacturing, logistics, packaging, and transport. Crude prices surged from the mid $60s to over $100 per barrel in March, and JP Morgan sees Brent staying in the low $100s even if Hormuz reopens in June. 

For supply chain teams building cost models for Q3 and Q4, the Aramco earnings call delivered one clear message: the baseline assumption that energy markets normalise in the second half of 2026 is not supported by the evidence. Nasser said that if and when normal trade and shipping resume, the company anticipates a very robust return to demand growth significantly higher than initial estimates for 2026. A demand surge into a market still rebuilding its inventory buffers is not a soft landing scenario. 

The disruption is not arriving as a price spike that resolves in weeks. It is arriving as a multi-quarter recalibration of the energy cost assumptions that your entire supply chain was built on.