Status as of 12:30pm Eastern, Friday August 7. No joint statement has been published. Oman has still said nothing publicly. There has been no word from Iran's Supreme Leader. This article is being updated as the day develops; revisions are logged at the bottom.
The problem with Iran's proposed Hormuz toll is not whether Tehran and Muscat can agree on it. It is that a shipowner who pays it may lose the insurance that makes the voyage possible.
Reuters reported Friday, citing four industry sources, that a clause introduced by the Lloyd's Market Association in late July terminates war-risk cover for any vessel that pays a Strait of Hormuz transit fee. The association's language is blunt: insurers have no liability to indemnify any such payment.
Separately, the US Treasury has sanctioned the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, the body Iran created in May to administer the waterway and the entity that would collect the money. Paying it exposes an owner to asset freezes.
Put those together and the toll at the centre of this negotiation may be unusable even if every government signs. An owner who pays sails uninsured and risks sanctions. An owner who refuses does not get the transit Iran is selling.
Brent crude traded near $83.70 a barrel early Friday afternoon, up about 1.4%, with WTI near $78.40, also up about 1.4%. Brent settled Thursday at $82.49, up $3.04 or 3.8%, and WTI at $77.29, up $2.07 or 2.8%. Several outlets reported that both benchmarks settled more than $3 higher on Thursday. That is true of Brent and not of WTI.
A Correction to Our Own Numbers, and It Is the One We Warned You About
On Wednesday and again on Thursday we told you Brent had fallen about 12% on the week. That figure was wrong, and the way it was wrong is embarrassingly specific.
We compared October Brent against $90.12. That was the September contract's price when it expired on July 31. October settled that same day at $87.93, $2.19 lower, for the same commodity. Measuring October against October, the drawdown from July 31 to Wednesday's $79.45 was about 9.6%, not 11.8%.
Roughly two points of the fall we reported was a calendar change, not a price change.
This is the first item on our own reference page on oil data traps, published nine days ago, which uses these exact two contracts and these exact two numbers as its worked example. We wrote the warning and then walked into it twice.
Here is why the trap is so difficult to avoid, and this part is useful to anyone checking prices themselves. Pull "Brent, July 31" from a standard historical price series and you will generally get $90.12, because those series follow the expiring contract right up to expiry. Compare that against today's quote, which is October, and you have silently measured two different contracts. Nothing in the data tells you it happened. When we asked a researcher to verify this week's move from scratch today, without showing them our figure, they returned 7.15% using the same $90.12 and stated there was no roll distortion.
The corrected figures: Brent is down about 4.8% on the week as it stands, and the Monday-to-Wednesday collapse was about 9.6%.
Nothing Landed on the Friday Marker
A senior Gulf official told CNN this week that the odds of an Iran-Oman agreement by Friday were roughly even. Friday is most of the way through.
There is no deal, no published text, no joint statement and no signing. There is also no collapse. The file simply has not moved.
The only Iranian comment of the day came from Hassan Ghashghavi, spokesman for parliament's national security and foreign policy commission, who told the state news agency IRNA that the framework has been determined and the final text will be announced soon, but that the final decision must be made at higher levels.
That is weaker than what Tehran was saying on Wednesday, not stronger. Friday is the Iranian weekend and parliament does not sit, so the quiet is partly structural. But the pattern of the week has been that each new statement adds a condition rather than removing one.
Oman has still not said a word. We checked the Omani foreign ministry's own site again on Friday. Its most recent item concerning Hormuz is a joint statement dated 23 June, which concerns the earlier Islamabad memorandum and contains no routes, no coordinates and no fees. Every detail of this agreement that has reached print, for the fourth consecutive day, comes from Iranian officials or from Western reporting on leaked drafts.
Iran's Supreme Leader has not approved, rejected or appeared. Bloomberg reported Thursday that Mojtaba Khamenei has been in hiding since being injured and that it is unclear whether he has given consent. The contradiction we flagged Thursday, with Axios reporting approval was completed on Tuesday and the Associated Press reporting it had not happened, is no closer to resolution.
The Money Is Still Three Different Numbers
Three incompatible accounts of the fee are live simultaneously.
Iran is reported to want 5% to 7% of cargo value. Oman is reported to have proposed about 3%. A US official said Friday that any temporary routes will operate "without any impediments," meaning no approvals, no permissions, no tolls and no charges. A separate account describes service-based fees that are explicitly not a percentage of cargo.
Bjarne Schieldrop at SEB Research put the political version of the problem plainly: the structure of the agreement in its current form, and the power it gives Iran, is not something Trump can accept politically.
There is a further tension worth watching rather than resolving. While the foreign ministry negotiates a corridor, a committee of Iran's parliament is reviewing a preliminary bill that would bar American, Israeli and other hostile vessels from the strait entirely and fine violators up to 20% of cargo value. The two documents point in opposite directions.
The Market Moved $3 on a Draft Bill
That parliamentary bill is, according to Reuters, the main thing that moved oil on Thursday.
It is not law. It has not passed. It is under expert review, with parliament inviting specialists to submit recommendations before it is finalised. It surfaced through the Fars news agency, citing an unnamed lawmaker, and no sponsor has been named.
Brent settled up $3.04 on it.
Bloomberg emphasised a different Fars item from the same window, a report that Iranian forces had engaged hostile targets near the strait. Both wires were reading the same news agency and reached different conclusions about what mattered. That is a fair measure of how thin this tape has become.
Lin Ye, vice president for oil at Rystad Energy, gave the most precise reading of what the market has actually concluded. It is not pricing a bad deal, he said. It is pricing confirmation that whatever emerges is a managed, conditional corridor rather than a restoration of normal flow.
Friday has been two-way. Brent held flat through the Asian and European sessions, sat at $83.24 in the middle of the London day, and only gained after the American open. July payrolls came in at minus 23,000 against expectations of a solid gain, with the prior two months revised down, and the dollar fell to a seven-week low. A weaker dollar supports crude while a weaker labour market argues the other way.
Two structural signals are worth separating from the noise.
The Brent-WTI spread has widened every session this week, from $3.43 on Monday to $5.30 today. That is not a data artefact. Hormuz risk is a seaborne premium, so it prices into the international benchmark and not into landlocked American crude. The spread widening is the cleanest single measure of how much of this move is the strait rather than the world.
The forward curve tells a different story from Thursday's. Brent's October-to-January spread widened from $3.75 at Wednesday's settle to $4.94 at Thursday's, a $1.19 move that was a genuine tightening in physical structure. On Friday it is $4.90, essentially unchanged, and the prompt October-to-November leg actually flattened. So Thursday's rally carried a real scarcity signal and Friday's does not. Friday looks like a weak dollar and position-squaring.
We reported Thursday's spread as $4.49. That was an intraday reading taken in the morning, set against Wednesday's settle, which mixed two different measurement points. Settle to settle, the move was larger than we said.
Traffic Fell in the Week the Deal Was Announced
The cleanest fact of the week is the one that gets the least attention.
Kpler data reported by Reuters counted 33 transits from Monday to Thursday, against 50 in the equivalent stretch a week earlier. Thursday produced four. Six crude tankers cleared the strait outbound in the entire week, against 21 inbound, most using the Iranian-designated route.
Traffic went down in the week Iran announced an agreement.
Central Command's blockade tightened over the same days. Its count of commercial vessels redirected went from 44 on August 3 to 45 on August 5 to 49 on August 6, plus two disabled and two boarded. Five vessels turned away in three days.
Trump described the strait on Thursday as "sort of open right now." Fewer than ten ships a day crossed it from Sunday to Tuesday.
One phrase of his is being widely misquoted and is worth getting right. He said "the war's got to end pretty soon, I don't think they can go much longer." He was saying Iran cannot go much longer. He was not conceding that the war must stop.
We also owe a caution on a number we have used all week. We are not going to convert transit counts into a percentage of normal, because the two published baselines are roughly twice apart: the IMF's PortWatch uses 73 vessels a day pre-crisis, while Reuters and others use 130 to 140. Anyone quoting a percentage without naming the baseline is picking one arbitrarily.
Aramco's Buyers Were Already Rerouting Before It Asked Them To
Saudi Aramco set Friday, August 7 as the deadline for Asian customers to nominate September cargoes from Ras Tanura, inside the Gulf, and to file alternative nominations from Yanbu on the Red Sea or Sidi Kerir on the Mediterranean in case the strait stays closed.
Whether buyers took the alternates will not be visible for several days. Allocation results normally surface three to seven days after nomination, and no reporting on it exists yet.
What is already on the record is that the rerouting started before Aramco asked. SK Energy chartered a very large crude carrier in late July to lift 2 million barrels from Sidi Kerir to Ulsan, loading August 18 to 20, at a lump-sum freight of $18.5 million. At least eight VLCCs were signalling Sidi Kerir by the end of July. India's state refiners were seeking discounts of $5 to $10 a barrel to take Mediterranean cargoes.
Rerouting costs roughly $10 million a shipment, about $5 a barrel, and the Mediterranean route adds 20 to 25 days.
There is a constraint in Aramco's offer that explains this week's odd pricing. Only Arab Light is available at the alternate terminals, and in limited volume. A buyer who switches gives up the medium and heavy grades entirely. That is very likely why Aramco cut its light grades 50 cents for September while raising medium and heavy by $1.25: it is pricing the grades you can only get from behind the strait.
Aramco's chief executive said Monday that flows through Hormuz are running at a tenth of pre-conflict levels, and that the world loses more than 100 million barrels for every week the strait is closed.
Fifteen Ships Hit, and One Attack Nobody Can Confirm
ADNOC said Friday that 15 vessels have been struck since the war began, three of them this week, with one crew member killed and 20 injured. That is a named corporate source rather than a claim, and it is the freshest tally available.
No new attack was reported in or near Hormuz on Thursday or Friday. The most recent kinetic event in the strait remains Wednesday's explosions off Kumzar, which UKMTO downgraded from an attack to an advisory after concluding the intended target could not be identified.
The Minoan Pioneer has not moved. The bulk carrier struck northeast of Khasab on Monday night is still abandoned, still smoking, and there is still no salvage activity visible in satellite imagery, reportedly because salvors risk being attacked themselves. Its third engineer has been missing for five days. No group has claimed the attack and no government has attributed it.
One incident deserves more attention than it received. The Saudi-flagged tanker NCC Wafa, which the Houthis claim to have struck off Yanbu, was on a domestic Saudi coastal run hundreds of kilometres from the declared blockade zone. The claim remains unverified, with no confirmation from the operator or Saudi authorities. But the analytics firm Windward drew the conclusion that matters if it is true: route avoidance is no longer sufficient mitigation. The Red Sea was supposed to be the way around Hormuz.
Separately, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a mutual defence agreement in Jeddah on Friday under which an armed attack on one is to be treated as an attack on all. A Saudi deputy minister then played it down as not a military alliance.
What to Watch
The text, if it appears, and whether Oman ever confirms any of it. Four days into a bilateral agreement, one of the two parties has not spoken.
Whether the Lloyd's clause and the Treasury sanctions get carved out. If Washington wants this deal, it controls both obstacles. Nothing suggests it intends to move.
Aramco's September allocations, which will show in three to seven days whether Asian refiners actually chose the Red Sea and Mediterranean over the Gulf.
Baker Hughes publishes its US rig count at 1pm Eastern, after this article went up. Last week's reading was 588 rigs, up one, with oil at 451 and gas at 127.
A caution for anyone searching this themselves, because today's traps are unusually good. A joint statement between Oman and Iran on the Strait of Hormuz sits on the Omani foreign ministry's own website and ranks well; it is dated 23 June and concerns a different agreement. A story reporting that Khamenei approved a memorandum despite reservations is from 18 June and concerns the Islamabad memorandum with the United States, not the Oman deal. A report that Iran targeted 85 American military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait is from July 8. And explosions on Qeshm Island have been reported on at least five separate prior dates this year, so any Qeshm result needs its date checked in the body.
Iran spent this week announcing an agreement, then explaining that it does not reopen the strait, then saying the decision rests at a higher level. Over the same week, transits fell, the blockade tightened, and underwriters made the central mechanism uninsurable.
Update log
12:30pm ET, August 7. First published. No joint statement, no Omani comment, no word from Khamenei.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Oil market conditions can change rapidly. Consult a qualified financial professional before making investment decisions.