No. of Recommendations: 7
The US is likely bearing the cost of insuring all the Ship A's and the at-sea transfer slows things down a bit...but if you have more days of 25M+ barrels going out, the economic pressure on energy prices will ease.
Except that the volume of STS transfers doesn't mean that you have that volume of oil actually transiting the Gulf of Oman. That's just the volume of oil that moves from one ship to another ship.
Similarly, clearing the straits of mines doesn't correlate to forcing open the strait, either, since the threat of rocket attacks from shore is a major obstacle to ships transiting the strait without Iranian permission.
IOW, neither of those things indicates that there's any more (or less) oil going out of the straits. Maybe there is, or isn't - industry trackers can't find the uptick that the U.S. government is claiming. But STS volume is not the same thing as "barrels of oil went out."
