THE WASHINGTON POST: Trump says the Strait of Hormuz is open. But how much oil is really going through?

President Donald Trump has claimed to have already won the war with Iran, destroyed its military and “obliterated” its nuclear program, even as U.S. military officials worry about their own depleted arsenals and overextended ships at sea.

“There’s no fighting. … We have essentially taken over Iran,” Trump said recently, just before several tumultuous days of back-and-forth attacks on ships in the Persian Gulf, the launch of dozens - perhaps hundreds - of missiles, drones and interceptors, and major assaults on Saudi Arabia by Iranian-backed militants in Yemen and Iraq.

Days after declaring the war was just a “military conflict … small potatoes,” Trump said last week that “the war will end immediately after the [midterm] election,” when he predicted record gas prices would fall to “less than $2 a barrel.”

Iran, administration officials have said, is holding on in the face of enormous economic and military pressure, hoping that Republicans will lose their current struggle to retain their congressional majority in November.

In the meantime, the question of how many ships and how much oil are flowing through the Strait of Hormuz - reflected in the U.S. price of gasoline - has become the latest rhetorical battleground in the war.

In a cacophony of data, claims and assertions, the Trump administration figures vary significantly from those compiled by commercial maritime tracking organizations.

“We’ve been averaging 30 ships a night” through the Persian Gulf chokepoint, Trump said on Aug. 31. While he did not specify a time frame, or whether all 30 were oil tankers, that quantity could amount to more than 60 million barrels. (Very large crude carriers, the type that commonly transit the Strait of Hormuz, can carry more than 2 million barrels.)

The same day, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offered a more modest wartime high of more than 17 million barrels of oil over a 24-hour period. Three days later, Vice President JD Vance told reporters at a White House briefing that “we got about 15 million barrels out of the Strait of Hormuz just yesterday, despite the fact that the Iranians … continue to shoot” at the tankers.

“We’re not doing crazy math,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said last week on Fox News. “We’re just reporting exactly what’s going through the southern route through the Strait of Hormuz, … and the running average right now is over 9 million barrels a day just on the waterborne routes.”

For comparison, the prewar daily average was roughly 20 million barrels.

Commercial shipping trackers, while skeptical, say it is possible that 15 or even 18 million barrels of oil might have transited the strait in one night at some point, although none has reported a figure that high.

“Plenty of days might be over 11 or 12 million, but then the next day will be 4 or 3 million,” said Brett Erickson, managing principal of Obsidian Risk Advisors. “You need to be looking at rolling averages. It’s been consistently at 6.5 to 7 over a month. It’s getting closer toward eight now, but it needs to be sustained.”

In data released Saturday, the maritime intelligence agency TankerTrackers reported a 60-day average at 7.85 million barrels a day.

On Sunday, Windward, a shipping analytics company, reported that on Sept. 10 just three outbound vessels made their way through the southern passage of the strait along the coast of Oman.

An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the administration in response to questions from The Washington Post, said that “the seven day average of oil and oil products” transiting the strait “is slightly above 10 million barrels a day. About 4 to 5 million barrels [a day] are additionally leaving the region via pipelines.”

These “work-arounds,” avoiding the strait by sending oil overland through pipelines, have supplemented the deficits created by the contested waterway.

The official spoke late last week before Saudi Arabia said it had shut down its pipeline to the Red Sea on Friday, following a drone attack by Iran-backed militants in Iraq. That Red Sea terminal, with an oil capacity of 7 million barrels per day, had been averaging about 4 million before the strikes.

That pipeline attack, along with last week’s seizure of territory in Yemen by Houthi rebels at the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, have further threatened oil exports from the region.

The administration wants to “cherry-pick and report as high a number as possible because they want oil prices … to remain in check,” said Matt Smith, the lead oil analyst at Kpler, a maritime data company.

The same day that Trump reported an average of 30 ships per night through the Strait of Hormuz, Kpler reported that traffic had “declined sharply … with five confirmed crossings, down 50 percent from 10 a day earlier.”

The company noted that most ships turn off their transponders to hide from Iranian attacks, and that its data was “preliminary” as more satellite information was awaited.

“Additional ‘dark’ crossings may be retrospectively identified and added as new confirmation data becomes available,” Kpler said.

Wright has also said that daily commercial tracker reports do not reflect the true number of ship transits because they don’t have information available to the U.S. government.

Michelle Wiese Bockmann, senior intelligence analyst at Windward, acknowledged a lag time between the company’s daily estimates and more accurate figures that take into account ship transmissions, satellite views of vessels loading and leaving port, and visible ship-to-ship transfers.

“We have visibility, but we don’t always have it in real time,” she said.

The path many vessels follow from non-Iranian Persian Gulf ports is a complicated route with several stages. With most commercial tankers reluctant to run the Hormuz gantlet, ships belonging to the producing countries shuttle oil through the waterway into the Gulf of Oman, where it is transferred to the vessels that carry them to purchasers. The process can take days and tack hundreds of thousands of additional dollars onto the shipping price.

Before entering the strait, the shuttles contact U.S. military forces who facilitate their travel. U.S. naval vessels in the region also enforce a blockade against any oil vessels going into or out of Iranian ports as well as provide protection from afar, shooting down any incoming weapons from the ships or aircraft.

“We are coordinating with the shipping industry and providing protection when they make their transit in a coordinated way,” said a U.S. military official familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the secretive arrangements.

The military official said they are not escorting these ships but rather providing “best practices, timing, techniques and procedures.”

Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, said in an interview that “since May we have assisted more than 1,600 vessels, including more than 800 million barrels of crude.”

Data released Friday by the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Center put the number of “US stated facilitated transits outbound” through the strait over the previous seven days at 86, with a 30-day total of 303.

“The bottom line is traffic is flowing,” the U.S. military official said. “It’s not zero, but it’s also not at pre-conflict levels.”

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