The U.S. blockade that has constrained shipping from the Strait of Hormuz is starting to generate a second-order effect: it is squeezing Iran’s ability to export oil while also forcing limits on how long Iran can keep producing. Even with a long history of sanctions and infrastructure strain, analysts say the immediate operational problem is that tankers are filled but cannot get out, leaving fewer options for exporting crude and less room to store it at home.
Since the blockade began April 13, experts said Iran has faced a cascading pressure. With fewer tankers able to depart, Iran has less hard currency flowing back into an economy already affected by weeks of war, months of unrest and decades of international sanctions, according to the analysis. The same constraint also magnifies global impacts tied to any Strait of Hormuz disruption, contributing to shortages of jet fuel and rising gasoline prices around the world, the analysis said.
Iran had been pumping over 3 million barrels of crude oil a day before the war, the analysis said, with a little more than half going to the domestic market. Since the blockade began, analysts said ships have been loaded and effectively stuck, and that storage and output management are now becoming central to how Iran responds. Antoine Halff, co-founder and chief analyst at Kayrros, said the company’s monitoring pointed to “a significant slowdown in production” and to storage not filling as quickly as usual at Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf.
Halff said Kharg Island is Iran’s main export terminal and that Iran is likely storing some oil in tankers positioned around the island. Kpler, a commodities-monitoring firm, said it believes Iran has enough remaining capacity to store about two weeks of production even after reducing output. Wood Mackenzie estimated Iran will run out of storage capacity in about three weeks, warning that if the blockade persists, production cuts become unavoidable.
A separate consideration for analysts is what shutting in wells could do to Iran’s future capacity. Miad Maleki, a former sanctions expert at the U.S. Treasury who is now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Iran’s leaders are resisting shutting down oil wells because of the long-term pain such a move could cause. Maleki told AP that the wells “are not maintained well” after decades of sanctions and isolation, and he said that once shut down, the wells won’t easily “snap back after a few months.”
The pressure is building alongside other U.S. actions aimed at Iranian oil shipments. The analysis said the U.S. Treasury Department has ratcheted up sanctions on Iranian oil shipments already at sea and that the U.S. military has seized at least two tankers off Asia believed to be carrying Iranian oil. It also described how the blockade, by reducing the number of tankers leaving, can intensify the economic squeeze even if immediate revenue impacts are limited.
The analysis also placed the current confrontation in a longer arc of Iran’s oil industry being shaped by regional geopolitics. It recounted that Iran’s oil industry has been entangled in politics since a move to nationalize fields in the early 1950s helped trigger the 1953 coup that cemented Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s rule, and that the oil sector was again disrupted during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It said strikes by oil workers during the revolution brought production down from 6 million barrels a day to around 1.5 million, and that the industry later struggled through decades of international sanctions that left infrastructure aging.
In recent days, U.S. officials have publicly framed the blockade as capable of rapidly damaging Iran’s energy output. The analysis said President Donald Trump claimed Iran was “in a ‘State of Collapse’,” and it reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote on X that Iran’s “creaking oil industry is starting to shut in production thanks to the U.S. BLOCKADE,” adding that “GASOLINE SHORTAGES IN IRAN NEXT!” The analysis noted that it did not see immediate signs of gasoline shortages in Iran, although it described indirect acknowledgments of strain on state television.
The analysis said a segment on state TV, which is run by hard-liners, included journalists discussing the possibility of an oil storage crisis, including a note that if empty tankers are blocked from returning to Iran, “we won’t be able to export.” It also said Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad on Monday praised oil terminal staff for their “continuous perseverance.” Maleki said prolonged production slowdowns or halts could eventually translate into job losses for oil workers, potentially contributing to unrest, drawing on examples from past periods when disruptions hit the industry.
The wider context for analysts is that any blockade-driven shutdown is not simply a short-term interruption. With aging oil wells and the operational risks of keeping them running under constrained logistics, experts told AP that Iran could face delayed but significant financial pressure, even as Iran may try to manage the timeline of cuts to avoid a sudden, broader breakdown.