Hormuz: Nine Closed Corridors. One Crisis.
- Patrick Trancu
- 20 hours ago
- 6 min read
Last night, Patrick Trancu appeared on the television programme Radar broadcast by Swiss television station TeleTicino, to discuss the Gulf War, the Strait of Hormuz and the systemic crises it triggered: nine closed corridors, one crisis, a geopolitical earthquake in the Middle East.
Patrick Trancu and Sasha Delcol, host of the TV broadcast Radar on May 6th 2026
When the Strait of Hormuz blockade hit the front pages, attention focused on oil and flights. Understandable: these are the most visible effects, the ones that touch everyday life directly.
But the Strait of Hormuz was never just an oil corridor. It was the transit node for a disproportionate share of the commodities that hold the global economy together. The World Economic Forum has documented it: the closure disrupted at least nine critical supply chains simultaneously. Not one after another — all of them, on 28 February 2026.
The number that frames everything: before the conflict, 20 million barrels a day flowed through that 33-kilometre stretch of water. Today fewer than 4 million pass through. Alternative routes exist, but they cover roughly one third of pre-crisis flows. The remaining two thirds have simply vanished from the market.
What follows is a map of what has vanished — and where the consequences are materializing.
The visible corridors
1. Jet fuel — — the corridor everyone is talking about
Kerosene prices have reached a historic record of $1,900 per tonne. European stocks at the ARA hub in Rotterdam are at a six-year low. IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol has stated that Europe has "maybe six weeks or so" of jet fuel left. CAPA — the leading aviation analysis centre — identifies June as the first critical month for the most exposed airports if Hormuz remains closed.
The rationing logic, once the critical threshold is reached, is already written: major hubs first. Secondary airports lose connectivity suddenly, not gradually. Air BP Italia has already issued reduced availability notices and imposed per-flight refuelling caps at Linate, Bologna, Venice and Treviso. This is not a hypothesis: it is already happening at reduced scale.
2. Belly cargo — the invisible corridor within the visible one
This deserves a separate entry because it is structurally different from the others. Around 50% of global air cargo does not fly on dedicated freighters: it flies in the holds of passenger aircraft. When a flight is cancelled due to fuel shortages, that freight capacity disappears silently — without announcements, without aggregated data on the front page.
Pharmaceuticals, active ingredients from Asia, semiconductors from Taiwan, high-value industrial components: products with no equivalent alternative transport mode. Cargo rates are already up 95% in a month, with Asia-Europe capacity down 40%. The blind spot of this crisis is not tourism. It is the cargo.
3. Gas naturale liquefatto — the crisis that arrives in winter
Qatar is Europe's third-largest LNG supplier. Its tankers leave through Hormuz: there is no alternative route from the Ras Laffan terminals. With the Strait closed, this share is zeroed out — not reduced.
The critical moment is not today. It is October-November 2026, when winter puts storage levels to the test. Europe has nearly eliminated its Russian gas dependency since 2022 and replaced it, in part, with the Gulf. If summer stockpiling remains insufficient, winter poses a politically unsustainable choice: domestic heating or industrial continuity.
The less visible corridors
4. Urea and fertilisers — the 2026 harvests already compromised
The Persian Gulf accounts for 46% of global urea trade, the world's most widely used nitrogen fertiliser. The supply chain is linear and fragile: natural gas → ammonia → urea → agriculture. With gas blocked, the chain stops. Nitrogen fertiliser prices have already risen by more than 50%.
The problem is not only cost: it is timing. May-June is the application window for summer cereals. A field that does not receive fertiliser at the right moment loses productivity for the entire season — irreversibly. The 2026 autumn harvests are already partially compromised. The effects on food prices will be visible from autumn.
5. Sulphur — the hidden feedstock of the energy transition
Nearly half of global seaborne sulphur trade passes through Hormuz. Sulphur is the feedstock for sulphuric acid, which serves two supply chains rarely associated with the Middle East: electric vehicle battery production — in the refining process for nickel, cobalt and copper — and high-concentration phosphate fertilisers. The shortage is already causing industrial slowdowns at nickel processing hubs in Indonesia and across the African copper belt. A cascade effect on the energy transition that almost no analyst is citing.
6. Helium — the corridor that concerns hospitals
Qatar produces almost one third of the world's helium as a by-product of natural gas processing. Helium is not a gas for balloons: it is indispensable for semiconductor production and, above all, for the operation of MRI scanners in hospitals. The superconducting magnets of MRI machines must be cooled with liquid helium to extreme temperatures — without a stable supply, the machines stop.
European hospitals with MRI scanners at risk of operational shutdown: this is the dimension of the crisis that does not appear in the news. Yet it is already unfolding in technology and healthcare supply chains.
The industrial corridors
7. Methanol — plastics, paints, synthetic fibres
Around one third of global methanol trade passes through Hormuz. Methanol is the feedstock for resins, paints and synthetic fibres. China — the world's largest buyer — risks acute shortages at port inventories. The effects ripple through Asian textile supply chains producing for European markets, industrial paints and mass-market plastics.
8. Primary aluminium — construction and renewables
The Middle East produces around 9% of global primary aluminium outside China. More than 150,000 tonnes of metal registered at the London Metal Exchange have already been withdrawn from warehouses, reflecting the disruption to regional exports. Aluminium feeds into construction, transport and — with structural irony — the infrastructure for renewable energy.
9. Iron ore pellets and steel — the steelmaking pause
The Gulf is a significant supplier of high-grade iron ore pellets and direct-reduced iron, premium feedstocks for global steelmaking. Shipowners began avoiding the Strait almost immediately after the escalation. Buyers in Asia, India and the Middle East have suspended new procurement. Global steelmaking is running on inventories, not flows.
What all nine have in common
These are not nine separate problems triggered by the same event. They are nine manifestations of a single structural vulnerability: global dependence on a 33-kilometre geographic corridor for a disproportionate share of critical commodities — energy, chemicals, metals, fertilisers, industrial gases, materials for the energy transition.
Everyone knew Hormuz was vulnerable. It was the world's most documented energy chokepoint. The risk had been mapped, modelled and cited in every geopolitical analysis for the past thirty years. Yet the redundancy was never built, because the cost seemed disproportionate as long as closure remained hypothetical. Now it is real.
There is a name for this dynamic in crisis management literature: the known-but-unacted. The gap between the risk one knows and the risk one prepares for. Hormuz was the known risk par excellence. It has become the most costly unacted risk in global energy history.
Michele Wucker has a precise name for this type of risk: the grey rhino. Not Taleb's black swan — the unpredictable event that arrives from nowhere. The grey rhino is large, visible, moving towards you from a distance, and ignored precisely because it is too obvious to seem urgent. Hormuz had been a grey rhino for decades. Donald Rumsfeld would have used a different category: not an unknown unknown — something we don't know we don't know — but a known unknown, something we know we don't know how to handle. In fact, something even more insidious: a known known we never translated into action. We knew about the risk. We knew we were not prepared. We chose, implicitly, to live with that vulnerability because the cost of preparation seemed disproportionate relative to the perceived probability of the event. Until the event arrived — and transformed the cost of non-preparation into the most expensive energy bill in global history.
For those working on organisational resilience, the relevant question is not how many corridors the Iran conflict has closed. It is how many analogous corridors exist within their own supply chains — known, mapped, never truly addressed — waiting to become, one day, equally real.
This article was co-written with Claude
