Supply Chain Action Points
Read this first — the conclusion, and the moves to make:
- By 19 June, re-quote every Gulf-linked LPG cargo on four separate lines: ocean freight, war risk premium, transit toll, documentary cost. No blended number reaches an approval.
- Set a parcel threshold this week: compute the toll per cubic metre at your actual parcel size, and route any voyage where it exceeds 2% of cargo value through a separate approval rather than a freight decision.
- Before accepting documents on any Gulf-origin parcel, require the AIS track, bill of lading and port call to reconcile. Apply it to 100% of parcels above your threshold, starting with the next presentation.
- Confirm war risk cover in writing before every fixture rather than once a quarter, because cover written in seven-day tranches can lapse between two voyages.
- Budget the invoiced toll, not the $2 million ceiling, and carry the gap between ceiling and invoice as a separate contingency line reviewed on the first Monday of each month.
Iran-linked LPG carriers have been detected using AIS spoofing, dark transits, and fraudulent documentation to move cargoes to India and Pakistan despite the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports, according to a June 10 enforcement update. The Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately 20% of the world's seaborne oil transits, remains under restricted access with Iran charging tolls of up to $2 million per vessel for selective passage. While commercial shipping has partially resumed since the April 17 reopening, war risk premiums and transit constraints continue to elevate costs. Five LPG carriers were identified using deceptive shipping practices to evade enforcement, highlighting the growing sophistication of sanctions evasion tactics and the ongoing challenges for maritime security in the Gulf region.
The Analysis
Two million dollars a vessel. That is the number everyone is quoting out of the June 10 enforcement update, and it is the number I trust least. Iran is charging tolls of up to $2 million for selective passage through the Strait of Hormuz, and five LPG carriers have been caught using AIS spoofing, dark transits and fraudulent documents to move cargoes to India and Pakistan around the US naval blockade. Roughly 20% of the world's seaborne oil moves through that strait.
Before anybody puts that figure in a budget, take it apart. Up to is a ceiling, not a price. A ceiling tells you the worst number a negotiator can name. It does not tell you the distribution of what actually gets invoiced, whether the charge is per transit, per direction, per call, or per vessel per week, or what happens when you pay and the escort does not show. Every one of those blanks is worth more than the headline.
What we do know is that commercial shipping has been partially back since the April 17 reopening, and that war risk premiums and transit constraints are still pushing costs up. Partial is the operative word. A reopened strait and a working strait are two different assets, and the toll is priced against the second one.
The 20% figure needs a warning label. It is a share of seaborne oil, and LPG does not move on the same ships. LPG moves in pressurised and semi-refrigerated carriers, in smaller parcels, into dedicated terminals. Pasting an oil percentage onto a gas story makes the exposure feel larger than the number supports. What actually binds LPG is not how much of the world's oil is at risk. It is that the toll is charged per vessel.
Run the arithmetic. A $2 million toll is a fixed charge per hull, so the cost per unit of cargo falls as the parcel grows. On a 5,000 cubic metre pressurised cargo, that is $400 per cubic metre before the ship has burned a tonne of fuel. On an 84,000 cubic metre very large gas carrier, the same toll is about $24 per cubic metre. Those two parcel sizes are my illustration, not figures from the article, but the ratio is not an illustration: the same charge sits 17 times heavier on the small ship. That is the story. A $2 million toll does not simply make LPG through Hormuz more expensive. It sets a minimum viable parcel size, and cargo below that size stops moving through the official channel, which is precisely why five ships were found running dark.
Five is a detection count, not a population. An enforcement update reports what was caught inside a window, not what was attempted. Treat five as a floor. If five were identified in a single update, the practice is not marginal; it is routine enough to have grown its own documentation, and that should worry an importer more than the toll does.
Here is the part the maritime security coverage skips. AIS spoofing does not only hide a ship from a naval screen. It breaks the correspondence between three records that have to agree: the AIS track, the bill of lading, and the port call. When the cargo arrives and those three do not reconcile, the delay does not happen at sea. It happens at the bank and at the claim desk, weeks later, when the goods are already on your books. The vessel took the risk. The party holding the documents inherits it.
Who feels this first is not who you would guess. A small importer taking one 5,000 cubic metre parcel a month feels it immediately and absolutely: at $400 per cubic metre the toll is not a surcharge, it is a different business. A large importer chartering a very large gas carrier feels it as a line item near $24 per cubic metre, painful but absorbable, and more importantly negotiable, because a loaded VLGC is worth escorting. Direction runs the opposite way from the headlines. An exporter selling FOB into the Gulf never sees the toll or the war risk premium, both of which sit with whoever fixes the ship. An importer buying CIF sees neither as a separate line and finds both inside a landed cost that moved for reasons nobody explained.
Four clocks are running and they are not synchronised. The toll is due at fixture, so it lands within days. The war risk premium is written in short tranches, typically seven days at a time, so it reprices weekly and can lapse between voyages. The documentary exposure matures at the next letter of credit presentation, four to six weeks out. The underwriting consequence arrives at renewal, once a year, and that is the one that lasts. If you are modelling this as one cost arriving on one date, the model is wrong before the first invoice.
The counterfactual is not a blown-up shipment, which is why people ignore it. Do nothing and nothing dramatic happens this month. The toll gets absorbed into a blended freight number, the war risk goes into the same line, and by the time the documentary discrepancy surfaces you cannot tell which of the three caused it. What you get is a slow, unattributable margin leak discovered at year end, plus a renewal that comes in worse than your loss history justifies because your file has a gap in it. A gap in a file is not a cost until renewal, and then it is the only cost.
The easiest mistake is budgeting the ceiling. Carrying $2 million as your provision means over-reserving on the easy voyages and under-reserving on the ones where the escort is late and the invoice contains items the ceiling never covered. Budget the invoiced number. Hold the difference between invoice and ceiling as a named contingency, reviewed monthly, and never let the two merge into one line, because the moment they merge you lose the only signal that tells you which voyages are actually being taxed.
A toll with no published schedule is not a price. It is a negotiation with a receipt attached. The line to lock is not a dollar figure, since the article gives no rate to anchor against and I am not going to invent one. It is the point where the toll on your parcel crosses a set share of cargo value. Pick that share before you book, write it into the approval, and on the day the invoice crosses it you stop fixing and start asking who else can carry the parcel.
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