Research
Strait of Hormuz: Assessing Threats to Energy Security in the Persian Gulf
About 90% of the oil exports from the Persian Gulf transit the Strait of Hormuz each day – generally more than 17 million barrels or more than 18% of daily worldwide oil demand. The Strait is in a neighborhood rife with political conflict, and many experts fear that an accident, terrorist attack, or military effort to close the passage, even if it only temporarily interrupted oil tanker traffic, could severely threaten the global economy.
Many pundits presume that it would be relatively easy for an attacker – specifically including the Iranian military – to "close the strait." How hard would it be, using modern military equipment and a trained, professional force? How would the oil market adapt to such a disruption – including oil producers, the tanker industry, and insurance firms? What political and military steps could powerful countries like the United States take to remedy the situation? This research project evaluates the severity of the threat. Project Findings Our analysis reveals limits to Iran's ability to materially reduce the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz for a sustained period of time, even absent American or Coalition intervention to reopen the Strait. Stopping the transit of a significant number of supertankers is a challenging military mission, because the physical characteristics of tankers make them resilient to many attacks, the designs of modern weapons are optimized for other kinds of targets, and major military operations are complex and prone to failures due to the normal "fog of war." The bottom line is that oil supplies are more secure than many people seem to believe. While there is a clear role for the United States military in protecting the freedom of the seas and contributing to energy security, the threat is not so dire that the U.S. forces need to take a "hair-trigger" posture, reacting immediately to provocations that could precipitate unintended or unnecessary escalation.The website provides information to help assess the threat to oil flows through the Strait. Politicians, news reporters, investors, and participants in the oil market all react to incidents in the Persian Gulf. Over-reactions may offer Iran or terrorists excessive leverage, and sudden, unnecessary surges in the price of oil caused by investor psychology and fear cost consumers a great deal and threaten global prosperity. We hope that the web site can help provide information to differentiate serious threats – times when the world really should fear and react – from exaggeration.
About the Project This working paper is the product of a Policy Research Project, a year-long graduate course at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. The Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law provided financial support for the project. Professor Eugene Gholz directed a working group of sixteen master's candidates at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. The students made material contributions in gathering and analyzing data and in writing up the project report. The analysis presented in the students' working paper includes numbers that changed in subsequent versions, as the project gathered additional data and refined its estimates. We believe the general approach used in the analysis is sound, and the overall conclusions of the report are accurate to the best of our understanding.
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