US Central Command said on Saturday 19 September that more than a billion barrels of crude oil had left the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz under American protection "in the last couple of months". The ships that broadcast their positions tell a much smaller story. IMF PortWatch, which counts transits through the strait from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals that vessels transmit, recorded 90 tanker transits between 20 July and 19 September. In the same nine weeks of 2025 it recorded 3,238.
Adm. Brad Cooper, CENTCOM's commander, made three claims in a video posted on X. The billion barrels was the headline: "That's one billion barrels of crude oil out through the Strait of Hormuz in the last couple of months." He said American forces had reached that milestone "while assisting over 2,000 commercial ship transits through the strait by providing coordinated protection", that the volume of crude, cargo and liquefied natural gas moving through the strait over the past two weeks was "higher than at any point in the past six months", and that Iran had exported "zero barrels thanks to our ironclad blockade".
PortWatch, built by the International Monetary Fund with the University of Oxford from satellite-collected AIS data, does not reach 2,000 transits over any period this war has run. It records 1,420 transits of every vessel type, in both directions, from 28 February to 20 September; 862 since the Islamabad memorandum was signed on 17 June; and 311 since the US Navy reinstated its blockade of Iranian ports on 14 July. The busiest single day since then brought 10 ships through, on 8 August. On 20 September, the latest day in the data, PortWatch recorded one. In 2025 the strait averaged 85.5 transits a day, 48.2 of them tankers.
The two-week claim runs the other way in the same record. The fortnight to 19 September logged 64 transits, 16 of them tankers. The busiest fortnight of the war came straight after the memorandum: 384 transits, 195 of them tankers, between 23 June and 6 July, before the ceasefire collapsed on 8 July. Of the 192 two-week windows since the strait closed, the one Cooper described as the highest of the past six months ranks 108th in PortWatch's count.
The billion-barrel figure is large even against peacetime. Spread over the 60 days of "a couple of months", it works out to 16.7 million barrels a day. The Energy Information Administration put all oil moving through Hormuz in 2024 at 20 million barrels a day, refined products included, and said Saudi Arabia's 5.5 million barrels a day of crude and condensate was 38 per cent of the crude flow — which puts the strait's pre-war crude traffic at about 14.5 million barrels a day. Read literally, a billion barrels of crude in two months is more than the strait carried before the war began.
The EIA's own September outlook, published on 9 September, describes a market squeezed in the opposite direction. It estimates that Middle East crude production shut in because it cannot be exported averaged 6.7 million barrels a day in August, up from 5.0 million in July, and assumes shut-ins will average 5.7 million a day through the fourth quarter. It put Brent at an average of $91 a barrel in August. The spot price it publishes has been far higher since: $130.80 on 15 September and $114.89 on 22 September.
There is a way for CENTCOM's figure and the tracking record to both be right, and it is not hidden. Gulf producers have been moving crude on tankers with their AIS transponders switched off, a practice Reuters reported again on 22 September, as visible traffic through the strait fell to a multi-month low. Such ships do not appear in PortWatch's counts, or in any other public tracker built on AIS. But the arithmetic of that reconciliation is stark. The 90 tankers PortWatch did see between 20 July and 19 September had a combined deadweight of 1.33 million tonnes; even if every one had left the Gulf fully laden with crude, they could have carried about 10 million barrels. For a billion to have passed, 99 barrels in every hundred must have moved without a public trace.
None of this shows that CENTCOM's number is wrong. AIS is a collision-avoidance system, not a customs register, and a navy escorting darkened convoys through a strait under missile fire would produce exactly this kind of gap. What the record does show is that the claim cannot be checked against any public dataset; that, if "a couple of months" means two, it exceeds the strait's pre-war crude flow; and that it has to be squared with shut-in estimates from another arm of the same government.
This publication's own reporting overstated the one real recovery in the record. On 27 June we wrote that daily transits had "climbed back toward normal levels" after the memorandum, and on 28 June that Hormuz traffic had "normalized". PortWatch's busiest week after the memorandum, 22 to 28 June, averaged 30.4 transits a day — about a third of the 2025 average — before the count fell back to single figures in mid-July. Both statements are corrected in our corrections log, and the weekly series behind this story is published as a dataset.
The strait itself remains contested. Iran says talks cannot even begin until Washington accepts a "safe shipping route" set by Iran and Oman, and the IRGC says it has fired on vessels attempting what it calls illegal passage. At the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September, President Donald Trump said US envoys had held a "very good" three-hour meeting with Iranian officials and that another was scheduled "in the very near future" — while telling the Assembly that a deal was possible after the US midterm elections and that the alternative was to "annihilate" the Islamic Republic.