Bab el-Mandeb halved: EIA's reading of Red Sea oil flows through August 2024

On 11 October 2024 the US Energy Information Administration published a clean, quantitative picture of what the Red Sea crisis had done to oil logistics. Oil trade through Bab el-Mandeb averaged 4.0 million barrels per day in 2024 through August, against 8.7 million barrels per day in full-year 2023. Flows around the Cape of Good Hope rose to 9.2 million barrels per day in the first eight months of 2024 from 6.0 million in 2023.

The southern Red Sea chokepoint had, in practical terms, lost more than half its oil throughput. After Iran's attacks on Israel on 1 October 2024, Brent reached 81 dollars per barrel on 7 October and stood at 79 dollars on 10 October. Market participants should also keep an eye on inventory quality, not only inventory quantity. Contango and backwardation, floating storage economics, and the location of stocks relative to demand centres determine whether a headline surplus is actually available to distressed buyers in a given week.

Producer organisations, consumer agencies, shipping analytics firms and regulators often describe the same physical system with different residual assumptions. The Transition Economics Institute tagline, Making the transition add up, is used here as an engineering standard rather than a slogan. Second-order couplings deserve routine attention: power prices feeding industrial gas demand; Chinese LNG swings releasing or absorbing Atlantic cargoes; coal import cycles altering dry-bulk freight; mineral export controls raising equipment costs for the renewables that cut fossil demand.

Risk communication to non-specialist audiences should separate three layers: the physical flow change, the price transmission channel, and the policy response option. Governance timelines should be mapped beside price charts on the same page.