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Hormuz Is Quietly Opening.. first Good News in 100 Days...now the Slow Pain Begins

Published: June 4, 2026

TIGZIG - Hormuz Is Quietly Opening - first good news in 100 days, now the slow pain begins. Dark tankers slipping out of Hormuz with transponders off. The strait is effectively opening through a quiet arrangement Iran controls and meters, mostly for the countries it picks. Open is not the same as flowing - production restart, redirected tankers and war damage push recovery into months and years.

A few crude tankers are slipping out of the Strait of Hormuz with their transponders switched off. Just a trickle. But to me this is the strait effectively opening.. not through any clean announcement, but through some quiet, worked-out arrangement, and only for select countries.

And after a hundred-odd days of a shut chokepoint, that is solid news. Real good news in this whole mess, and I am not going to undersell it. But here is the point I want to make.. even a fully open strait does not mean the oil problem is solved. What it means is a different, slower kind of pain now begins.. hopefully one that stops short of tragic for the economies in the firing line. Good news, yes. But a reopening is where the slow pain starts. The old pain does not just end with it.

What the ships are doing

Over the last few weeks, a handful of supertankers have made it out of the Gulf carrying Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Emirati crude, moving with their tracking signals switched off. Per Reuters, working off Kpler and LSEG ship-tracking data, some of these had tried and failed to get out earlier, then made it through on a later run. Not a flood.. a trickle.. but a trickle where there was basically nothing for weeks.

For background, this goes back to the 2026 Iran war that kicked off on 28 February, after which Iran shut the strait that normally carries around a fifth of the world's seaborne oil. So crude is now getting out of a chokepoint that was, for all practical purposes, closed.

So this is an arrangement

A tanker going dark does not mean it becomes invisible. These are VLCCs. Hundreds of metres long. Radar picks them up, satellites pick them up, and the navies sitting on both sides of a narrow strait can see them too. The US is not losing track of these ships.

So why switch the signal off at all? Well, you cannot hide a ship that size from a warship anyway. The point of going dark is to break the paper trail. AIS, the automatic signal, is the public civilian feed, the data that Kpler, LSEG, the insurers, the banks and the trackers all read. Stop the feed and the ship drops off that public record. Now the insurer can say it did not know. The bank financing the cargo says the same. The origin of the barrel goes blurry. Going dark does not beat the satellite. It beats the documentation. And the documentation is what the whole sanctions and insurance machinery runs on.

The US can see the ship. The ship still gets out. That works only one way, somebody is letting it through.

And look at who is getting through. Per CSIS, more than half the vessels that made it since early March are run by companies from just a handful of countries, with China right at the top, this after reports that Beijing leaned on Tehran to protect its ships. These are the countries Iran has a reason to wave through. US-flagged carriers are not steaming across freely.

In fact, the framework is out in the open. Back in March, Iran told the UN that non-hostile vessels could transit, but only in coordination with Iranian authorities. Then under the April ceasefire, brokered by Pakistan, Iran agreed to reopen the strait (Al Jazeera). And it has a price.. per Reuters, some of the tankers that made it out were let through by Iranian authorities in exchange for payments. So read it for what it is.. a gate that Iran controls and can meter.

And it is still a trickle. Nowhere near a recovery. CSIS tracked the rush right after Iran's mid-April reopening announcement.. dozens of tankers ran for the exit, most turned back, and only about a dozen actually made it through. Daily transits are still way below where they were before the war.

Open is not the same as flowing

So what happens in the best case? Say the ceasefire holds, the strait reopens properly, traffic goes back to normal. Even then, the oil does not come back at the speed of a press conference. The plumbing has been destroyed.. it has to be put back together. And that takes months and years.. not a button you press on the wall.

Energy Aspects, the independent oil research shop, put numbers to it in a note dated 2 June, off their own maritime data. Their framing is that the market keeps treating Hormuz as binary, open or closed, when the picture is much messier than that. Fewer than 50 laden non-Iranian tankers got through the strait in all of May. Here is their bottom line:

"Oil flow recovery will be slow, uneven and may never fully normalise."

The strait is moving a trickle, and mostly for whoever Iran picks. The rest of the world's tankers are still waiting.

Where that leaves the oil price

The worst case, the strait stays shut for good, is receding. That is the first decent piece of news in a hundred-odd days, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. As of early June there is even talk, per CBS, of a memorandum to extend the ceasefire, reopen Hormuz properly and lift the US blockade on Iranian ports. Reuters is framing the likely outcome as an interim deal that leaves Iran battered but not beaten.

But relief and pain are two different thingies.. the tail risk easing is one thing, the damage already done is another, and it is still working its way through. Crude is back near $100, having climbed off a late-May dip. And the truce is still being negotiated and tested as I write, so none of this is locked in.. and the price dances around with every new headline.

The dark tankers are a real signal. The rush for physical barrels has come off the boil, and that is why I say the strait is effectively opening. But the relief headlines are not the all-clear on oil. The supply chain has to be rebuilt before any of this reaches the fuel pump or the inflation print. And right now it is opening only for the countries Iran chooses to let through. The test is whether it widens to everyone, across the board, as the deal firms up. That has not happened yet.

Opening, yes. And that is real. Solved, no. The pain is mostly still ahead, but at a lower peak than the worst case we were staring at back in April.

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