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Hormuz vs Suez — the chokepoints compared
Two maritime chokepoints, two different crises. One carries the world's oil; the other its manufactured goods. The shock shape, the reroute geometry, and the recovery curve all diverge.
The Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal are the two maritime chokepoints most often discussed in the same breath. They are not equivalent. One carries the world's oil. The other carries the world's manufactured goods. A closure of either produces a different shock, on a different timescale, with a different recovery path.
What each chokepoint carries.
Hormuz carries roughly 21 million barrels of crude per day — about a fifth of seaborne oil — plus a quarter of seaborne LNG. Almost all of that traffic is energy. Suez carries roughly 12% of global trade by volume, but the mix is dominated by container ships moving manufactured goods between Asia and Europe, plus about 9% of seaborne crude and refined products. A Hormuz closure is a hydrocarbons crisis. A Suez closure is a containers crisis.
The width of the channel matters.
Hormuz is 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest, with two designated commercial-traffic lanes inside Omani territorial water. Suez is a man-made canal: roughly 200 metres wide and 24 metres deep. That difference shapes how each one fails. Hormuz fails through coercion — naval action, mining, missile threat — and reopens when the coercion ends. Suez fails through accident or physical obstruction and reopens when the obstruction is cleared. The 2021 Ever Given grounding closed Suez for six days. A Hormuz closure has no comparable mechanical shape; it persists as long as the underlying conflict persists.
The reroute geometry is different.
Cargoes that would normally use Suez can be diverted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding roughly ten days each way for the Asia-Europe leg. The Houthi-driven Red Sea disruption from late 2023 onward demonstrated this in real time: container lines absorbed the detour, freight rates spiked, and the global supply chain absorbed the shock through inventory drawdown and delivery-date slippage.
Hormuz reroute is different. The Petroline pipeline carries Saudi crude to Yanbu on the Red Sea, and ADCOP carries Emirati crude to Fujairah on the Indian Ocean — combined nameplate about 6.5 mbpd against normal Hormuz flow of 17 mbpd. There is no maritime alternative because the strait is the maritime alternative for everything originating inside the Gulf. A Hormuz closure cannot be cleanly rerouted; it can only be cushioned by reserve drawdown and demand response.
Recovery times diverge sharply.
Suez has a clean recovery profile: as soon as transit resumes, freight rates normalise within weeks. The 2021 closure produced a measurable but temporary spike. The Houthi-driven Red Sea disruption is a different category — recurring rather than single-event — but each individual incident still has a clear operational fix.
Hormuz recovery depends on the political shape of the closure. A 1980s-style Tanker War can persist for years at attritional intensity. A 1990-style overt closure ends with the underlying conflict. A coercive threat short of closure can sit at 4× insurance multiples for an extended period without any single tanker actually being damaged. The market response in each case is different.
The economic shock has different shapes.
A Suez closure is a freight-rate shock that compresses retailer margins, delays factory inventory, and shows up at consumers through prices and availability over weeks. A Hormuz closure is a price shock that arrives at consumers through the petrol pump within the same week, and through gas-fired electricity bills within the next quarter.
Hormuz is also more globally synchronised. Suez disproportionately hits Asia-Europe trade lanes; East Coast US trade routes around the Panama Canal are largely unaffected. Hormuz hits the global Brent benchmark, which prices every barrel everywhere — there is no insulated geography on the consumer side.
The chokepoints share one feature.
Both Hormuz and Suez are mutually-exposed: the countries most capable of disrupting them also depend on them. Iran cannot survive a closed Hormuz. Egypt earns roughly $9 billion a year in Suez transit fees. The asymmetry that creates the chokepoint also creates the political pressure to keep it open. Both chokepoints have, in practice, been disrupted partially and recurrently rather than fully and persistently. Both will probably continue that pattern.
Live transit count and freight stress at straits.live. Cape reroute economics at /cape-of-good-hope-reroute.