Oil tankers queuing off the Gulf of Oman. Empty jet-fuel depots in Frankfurt. A ten-million-rial banknote, printed last month in Tehran, that still struggles to buy a kilo of bread. As of this Thursday morning, the war in the Middle East has stopped being a diplomatic story and become something much harder for governments to spin \u2014 an economic one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking virtually to CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE conference in Singapore on April 23, Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, put it in words that will echo through finance ministries for months: “We are facing the biggest energy security threat in history.”<\/em> Thirteen million barrels per day of crude have already vanished from global supply, Birol said, and the Strait of Hormuz<\/a> \u2014 the channel through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil once flowed \u2014 remains under what the IEA now calls a “double-blockade,” with neither Iran nor the United States letting vessels pass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before the fighting, an average of 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products moved through Hormuz every day. That is more than the combined daily output of the United States and Saudi Arabia. The chart below tracks how quickly that lifeline has narrowed since the first Iranian strikes in late 2025 \u2014 and how much crude has already been stripped out of the market Birol is now trying to stabilise.<\/p>\n\n\n A superpower-sized hole in the global oil market<\/h2>\n\n\n\n