Late on Sunday an authority Iran created to run the strait posted a list to social media. The Persian Gulf Strait Authority named 45 tankers it says violated its transit protocols, without saying which rules any of them had broken, and held out fines, detention and confiscation of cargo.
Coming off the list means submitting explanations to Iranian maritime authorities, and Iran had already said what compliance costs. Owners must obtain clearance to cross and pay for security and other services. Two days later the IRGC’s spokesman, Hossein Mohebbi, said negotiators had settled “each country’s share of the strait’s waters as well as Iran and Oman’s share of its revenues”, and that the arrangement could raise billions a year. Oman has not confirmed that, and neither has Iran’s own civilian government, whose joint statement with Muscat on the twenty-fifth described an interim framework for resuming transits and mentioned no money at all.
So a charge exists and no tariff has been published. Two other waterways took the same question in the same week and answered it in the open, in opposite directions. Panama sold one slot for $5.3m at auction. In Singapore, the transport minister observed that open sea lanes cannot be taken for granted, in a strait where ships pay no toll at all.
Wet Bulk
The market has put its own price on the strait. TD3C, the 270,000-tonne run from the Middle East Gulf to China is now worth about $647,000 a day. TD34, which loads at a Gulf of Oman port outside the strait and discharges into the same market, sat at about $219,400. The spread between loading inside and loading outside is roughly $427,600 a day. TotalEnergies puts the all-in figure at about $20m to move one supertanker cargo through, which Patrick Pouyanne broke down as crude at $50 to $60 a barrel inside the Gulf and freight of about $10 on top. On a two million barrel cargo those two accounts agree.
That spread is the commercial case for the transfer trade, and Sinokor is running it at scale. The VLCC Singapore Prosperity loaded 301,000 tonnes at Ras Tanura and Juaymah, broadcast her position near Juaymah on the seventeenth, went dark, and reappeared off Fujairah showing Sohar as her destination. Three more of the company’s ships, the Malaysia Prosperity, the Algeria Prosperity and the Bulgaria Prosperity, lifted Aramco crude during August, and Aramco has been offering prompt Arab Medium and Arab Heavy to Asian buyers on a transfer basis at Sohar. Transfers involving Chinese and Hong Kong owned vessels in the Gulf of Oman passed 600,000 barrels a day in June and July.
The blacklist reaches that trade directly, and the buyers are enforcing it. Three Indian refiners and one global energy major have decided to stop using listed vessels, including for transfers. Formosa Petrochemical’s president, KY Lin, said his internal departments were still discussing how to handle Gulf deliveries by transfer over the longer term. A vessel can be seaworthy, correctly flagged, sanctioned by nobody a charterer’s own compliance team answers to, and still be unusable because the receiver will not accept her cargo. Kpler counted five vessels a day crossing the strait over the weekend against fourteen on Friday.
Gas split in two on the same water. BLPG1, Ras Tanura to Chiba, paid about $210,291 a day, which is the figure that makes a seven-figure Panama bid look like arithmetic. BLNG1, Australia to Japan, fell $12,800 to $49,800, and BLNG2 out of the US Gulf sits at $13,100.
Off Venezuela, tankers are waiting up to thirty days to load because the terminals cannot keep up with the cargoes PDVSA has sold. Jose handles about seventy percent of the country’s exports and has been interrupted by equipment failures, power outages and quality problems. At Guaraguao only two of seven docks were fully working in mid-August. Exports have not passed 1.25m barrels a day against capacity above 2.5m two decades ago, and the Consul, formerly the Syrma, has sat at Guaraguao for two years under a false Guyanese flag. PDVSA is being charged thousands of dollars a day in demurrage and has agreed to settle it in crude. Jovanny Martinez, one of its vice presidents, put the position plainly: “There are deficiencies and reliability must improve.”
Charterer Lens
- The gap between TD3C and TD34 is the market’s own price for crossing Hormuz, at WS623 against WS232.5. Where a cargo can be lifted at a Gulf of Oman port instead, roughly $427,600 a day is the budget available to arrange it.
- Counterparty acceptance now governs whether tonnage is usable. Establishing which vessels your buyers and receivers will refuse, before fixing, catches an exposure that vetting on flag, class and port state history does not, and it travels to any ship that transfers with a listed one.
- A clearance requirement with no published tariff cannot go into a voyage estimate. Settle in the fixture who pays an Iranian service charge if one is levied, and on what evidence, while there is still a negotiation to have.
Dry Bulk
The Black Sea collapse has produced its substitution, and it went north. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia booked about a million tonnes of wheat for August loading, half as much again as a year earlier and following a threefold jump in July, with roughly six million tonnes available across the season. Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan, all long-standing buyers of Russian grain, are among those switching origin. Karolis Tarasevicius of Scandagra called it a major shift in demand. Gintaras Pauza at Copenhagen Merchants’ Kaunas office noted the constraint on it, which is that Baltic wheat still costs more than Russian and some buyers are holding off at the margin.
Where the substitution queues is the Danube. Up to seventy vessels were waiting at the Sulina Canal on the twenty-fifth, with five to seven a day moving towards Ukrainian terminals. Katerina Kononenko, operations manager at Avalon shipping, was exact about the real number: it “is only two to three vessels per day. This is very low.” The causes are ordinary. There is a shortage of pilots, fuel and higher value cargoes are taking priority over grain, weather was expected to close the canal for about two days, and air raid alerts keep suspending port work. Delay at Sulina is running to $8,000 a vessel a day. At two to three transits daily a queue of seventy takes something between three and five weeks to clear from the back, which is $184,000 to $280,000 for a ship that arrives last. Ukraine moved 539,000 tonnes through those ports between the first and the twenty-first of August against 1.73m tonnes in the same window last year.
The price has also caught up. Chicago wheat has gained eighteen percent since the start of August and sits at a three-year high. Elena Tyurina of the Russian Grain Union expects this season’s Russian wheat exports to be the lowest in ten years, with growers selling at feed prices around $45 a tonne below production cost, and the union’s president Arkady Zlochevskiy has warned of catastrophic losses for farmers.
Freight, however, moved the other way. The Baltic Dry Index rose 345 points to 3,186 and the capesize index gained 784 points to 5,336. C5 lifted from the low $14s to above $16 for earlier arrivals and C3 reached the high $37s, with $38.50 fixed several times on Friday. Banchero Costa has global seaborne iron ore loadings up 3.5 percent in 2025 to 1,732.0m tonnes and 2026 running ahead of that. Grain volume is falling while dry freight rises, because the replacement origins are longer voyages to the same buyers.
Charterer Lens
- Eastern Baltic load ports bring their own draft limits, berth availability and despatch conventions, so price the voyage on those terms before the wheat differential settles where the cargo comes from.
- At Sulina the binding constraint is pilotage. A clause set that excepts port congestion may say nothing about a shortage of pilots, and with delay running to $8,000 a vessel a day that distinction is worth reading before the next Danube stem.
- Dry freight is rising while grain volume falls, which means distance is holding the index up. Benchmark a fourth-quarter requirement on the tonne-mile, since distance is what the freight is currently being paid for, and the support goes if the substitution reverses.
Regulatory and Trade
Panama charges for passage in the open, and last week the price of it reached $5.3m for a single slot. SK Gas paid it for the LPG tanker G. Spirit, for a transit on the first of September, beating the $4.6m another South Korean operator paid earlier in the month. The Canal Authority would not comment on the figure beyond noting significantly stronger demand against a median auction price before February of around $55,000. Before the war a slot went for $135,000 to $140,000. Eighteen bidders once chased a single opening, and arrivals with no reservation at all have risen from a tenth of traffic to between a fifth and a quarter.
Read against the alternative, that bid is arithmetic. At $210,291 a day on BLPG1, $5.3m is about twenty-five days of a VLGC’s earnings. The Gas Scorpio, which is not bidding, is sailing round South America instead and is currently off Chile, on a voyage roughly a month longer than the canal. Others are splitting the difference: the panamax Energia Grandeur is transferring cargo off Balboa to the neopanamax Eneos Wisdom, so that one ship can shuttle the canal repeatedly while Asian supply keeps moving. Julian Renton of East Daley Analytics described the position without much comfort in it: “The global LPG market is already stretched thin from Strait of Hormuz tensions, and the Panama Canal is one more disruption it simply couldn’t afford.”
The Authority spent Friday making its own rules easier to live with. From booking dates of the thirteenth of September, a company may hold more than one Neopanamax reservation for the same date and may book consecutive dates, both previously restricted, and may substitute a vessel after a slot is awarded provided the replacement carries an equal or greater Transit TEU Allowance. Unused containership slots can be passed to LNG and LPG carriers, then to vehicle carriers, roros and bulkers, inside a weekly total of sixty-three. That flexibility arrives as capacity falls. Neopanamax transits drop to nine slots a day from the third of September and the Panamax locks go from twenty-five to twenty-three on the fifteenth. Administrator Ricaurte Vasquez is planning for a long dry spell: he expects El Nino to run about eight months, Gatun Lake is already lower than it was in August 2022, and his instruction to customers is to consolidate cargo and bring a larger ship. “Every drop of water counts,” he said.
Charterer Lens
- Panama’s $5.3m slot is about twenty-five days of BLPG1 earnings and the South America detour costs about a month, so the auction has converged on the price of the alternative. Bidding is a calculation the desk can run before it commits.
- The looser Neopanamax rules from the thirteenth of September favour desks able to commit early and adjust later. Multiple reservations on one date, consecutive date bookings and vessel substitution on equal or greater Transit TEU Allowance are the parts worth using.
- Cost an unreserved Panama arrival as an open ended wait and price the routing alternative in advance, since arrivals without a booking have gone from a tenth of traffic to between a fifth and a quarter.
What Bounds a Toll
Different waterways were asked the same question last week, with different answers. Panama charges, publishes the number, and lets an auction set it. Iran requires payment for clearance and services, has published no tariff, and enforces with a list.
The difference that matters commercially is whether anything sets a ceiling on the charge. Panama’s is bounded by the alternative to Panama. At $210,291 a day on BLPG1, a $5.3m slot is about twenty-five days of a VLGC’s earnings, and the Gas Scorpio is demonstrating what the alternative costs by sailing round South America for roughly a month. Bid far above the detour and the ships stop bidding, which is why the record has climbed in steps and why the Canal Authority spent Friday making its slots easier to hold on to. An auction that competes with a route cannot outrun it.
There is no route round Hormuz. A cargo loaded inside the Gulf leaves through the strait or it goes onto a ship that did, which is what Sohar and Fujairah are for, and the transfer itself now carries the risk of joining the list. The market has already priced the difference at WS623 inside against WS232.5 outside, about $427,600 a day. That is the value of the only alternative there is, and it points at a different load port.
One of these charges is therefore a price and the other is a condition of entry. The first can be modelled in a voyage estimate this week. The second arrives at a desk as a question about which ships its buyers will accept.
Until next week,
The Voyager Portal Team
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