Oil could hit $150 if the passage isn't opened soon. Why the job is so hard. By Avi Salzman
The United States and Israel have made quick work of Iran's heavy artillery and navy in the war that started two weeks ago. Iran's grip over the Strait of Hormuz has proven much trickier to pry back. The task of unblocking the strait now looks like it will take weeks or longer, military experts said, absent a fast and full cease-fire.
The fate of global energy markets -- and the global economy -- rests on whether ships can traverse the 22-mile-wide waterway from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, through which 20% of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas passes. There is no clear plan for reopening it or protecting ships that traverse it, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright saying the military may not be able to focus on the task until the end of the month.
Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said Thursday that he wants it to remain closed, saying the move will "pressure the enemy."
If anything, conditions in the area have only gotten more dangerous since the war began. On Thursday, Iran attacked multiple tankers in the Gulf near Iraq. On Wednesday, three commercial ships near the strait were hit by projectiles, and Iran has been placing mines there, according to media reports.
The strait's closure has taken about 20 million barrels of daily oil supplies off the market, sending prices more than 30% higher. If it remains fully closed for weeks, analysts see oil prices climbing to $150 -- a level that could send the U.S. and other economies into recession.
Countries are going to great lengths -- from emptying their strategic oil stockpiles to rerouting supplies through underutilized pipelines -- to find other ways to replace the shortage. The U.S. is even lifting sanctions to allow some Russian oil to be sold. None of those ideas will come close to replacing all the lost supplies.
Reopening the strait is such a complex task that even a force with overwhelming power like the U.S. has no easy solution, and could be stuck cobbling one together for weeks or even months, experts said. The presence of mines severely increases the degree of difficulty, depending on how many there are. A Wall Street Journal report said officials believed Iran had placed fewer than 10 mines in recent days, while CNN said it was in the dozens. It's not clear if more mines had been placed before.
The problem is that the strait can't be cleared solely through a bombing campaign, or an attack by destroyers. Iran's navy has been severely depleted by the U.S., but the country doesn't need large attack ships to scare commercial vessels away. Its weapons include mines, fast attack boats, missiles and drones. Layered on top of each other, they become exceptionally difficult to remove.
"They've created an integrated, vertical stack of threats that can cover the strait from undersea all the way to above the surface," said Jonathan Schroden, chief research officer at the Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded nonprofit that does research for the Navy.
Once mines are in the water, this becomes "one of the most dangerous scenarios that people who focus on the Middle East have been thinking about for decades," he said.
In 2011, Schroden wrote a paper for U.S. Central Command -- which is leading the current war -- examining the military challenges of clearing the strait, and comparing it to a famous military disaster during World War I. In 1915, the allied forces including Britain tried to take control of the Dardenelles Strait, which was controlled by the Ottoman Empire and is part of present-day Turkey. The allies didn't adequately prepare for multilayered obstacles involving mines in the water and guns on the shore, and were drawn into a disastrous ground campaign that resulted in 250,000 casualties.
The U.S. military has been aware for decades that Iran has the ability to close the strait, but most analysts figured the possibility was remote because Iran's own oil transits through the waterway too. The current conflict has upended that assumption. With few other military options, Iran is now lashing out everywhere.
"If you back somebody into a corner far enough, they might just do that, " he said.
President Donald Trump has said that the U.S. could send naval ships to escort tankers through the strait. But doing so comes with its own risks. Ships would be vulnerable to mines, and projectiles launched from shore. "It would bring expensive U.S. warships very close to Iran's shores in ways that would make them vulnerable to other Iranian assets, like drones and antiship cruise missiles," said Caitlin Talmadge, a professor with M.I.T.'s security studies program. "It's notable that the U.S. is not actually doing this."
Wright told CNBC on Thursday that the military is "not ready" to escort tankers, because it's focused on attacking Iranian forces. Military escorts could be ready by the end of the month, he added.
Iran had an estimated 6,000 mines as of a year ago, including devices that can be placed on the sea floor and those that sit closer to the surface or are attached to the ships themselves, according to a report prepared for Congress by the Congressional Research Service. While the U.S. said that it destroyed 16 mine-laying ships in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday, Talmadge says that those kinds of attacks would not necessarily eliminate the problem. Iran is able to use much smaller vessels to place mines, too. Talmadge says the country has thousands of boats and small submarines capable of the task.
The Pentagon had no comment on whether it believes Iran has placed mines, or what the U.S. military has done about the threat.
Historically, the U.S. military has not focused much on mine-removal, depending on allies to handle the task, Schroden said. When the U.S. has looked to clear mines in the past, it's been a painstaking process. It took months for the strait to be fully cleared of mines after the Iran-Iraq War in 1988 -- and unlike today, that was during peacetime.
There is a hope that new technology, such as robots, can help speed up the task. Several companies -- including Lockheed Martin, Huntington Ingalls Industries, Textron, and RTX--make devices for detecting and destroying mines.
At this point, the fastest way to reopen the waterway would be to come to a quick cease-fire agreement, Schroden said. "If they put a few mines in the water and let's say a cease-fire were negotiated such that the mine clearing ships could go in there and do their business relatively unfettered, then it could be a matter of days," he said.
With the oil market on the edge of a crisis, the clock is ticking.
Write to Avi Salzman at avi.salzman@barrons.com
To subscribe to Barron's, visit http://www.barrons.com/subscribe
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 13, 2026 21:30 ET (01:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments