The Long Way Around
Six months into the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, what rerouted, what ran down, and what is gone. Four kinds of loss on four clocks, with the record on one side of today and your levers on the other.
open the piece at hormuz.exe.xyz →Started 2026-09-03 as its own project, a do-over of the cascade model that runs inside orbital-sim. That model treated the closure as a slider; six months into the real closure, the piece starts from the record instead, and asks which of the losses are deferred and which are destroyed.
A first pass is live: the record from IMF PortWatch, EIA, the World Bank Pink Sheet, JODI and FAO, a verification ledger with four sourced reference passes, 54 verbatim public claims scored against the record, and a small model that backtests against the EIA Brent spot path. The title is a working title, the copy on the piece is machine draft, and the essay is not written. The earlier orbital-sim scenario described itself as an agent-based model of commodity flow disruption through the strait and its second-order impacts: energy prices, fertilizer shortages, crop yields, food insecurity, and helium supply destruction. That chain is what this piece rebuilds from the record.
what it lets you do
Scrub one timeline from the last pre-war trading day into 2028. Five dials, oil, reserves, LNG, fertilizer and helium, show which losses were deferred and which were destroyed. Open the levers to set when and how the strait reopens, how fast the reserve is spent, and when the second pipeline comes on.
claims it answers
- “by the middle of July, the full extent of temporary buffers will have been exhausted, with an overall market adjustment of 7.1 mb/d ... crude prices could be $120 a barrel. Once markets expect the temporary buffers will be exhausted, the market price could rise to nearly $150 per barrel”
- “Today I looked at $96 a barrel, people thought that was going to be $300 a barrel.”
- “perhaps three million barrels a day of crude have moved today through the Strait of Hormuz”
- “Fertilizers must be applied at specific moments in the crop cycle. If they do not arrive on time, yields are reduced, regardless of what happens later.”
Real public claims, adjudicated on the piece itself, not here.
what it stylizes or leaves out
A first-pass prototype. The price relation is a single calibrated curve on 26 weeks of record; the helium tally assumes helium cannot ship when LNG cannot; route geometry on the map is schematic; facility positions come from an earlier, unverified dataset. Every number on the page names its source.