Every Route a Target

Oil around the Gulf is now under attack from three directions in a single week. Iran says it has retuned its tanker campaign to keep prices high through the American vote, Saudi jets have bombed Houthi fuel depots and a Houthi missile has reached Aramco's headquarters. Washington says the crude problem is mostly handled, while the shuttle tankers that carry that crude across Hormuz are exactly what Iran is now hunting.

Late on Tuesday a Houthi ballistic missile came down on an office tower at Saudi Aramco's headquarters in Dhahran, more than 1,100 kilometres from Houthi-held Yemen. The energy ministry reported a limited fire and no casualties. People with knowledge of the damage said the fire spread across several floors. Earlier that day Saudi jets had struck Houthi fuel depots around Sanaa, Dhamar and Hudaydah, along with the berths where imported fuel comes ashore. On Wednesday the Houthis claimed missiles and drones at Dhahran, Riyadh's airport and an Aramco refinery in the capital, and told oil workers to leave. Abqaiq and Ras Tanura sit in the same province as Dhahran.

Across the Gulf, two senior Iranian officials have said that Tehran changed the type and pace of its attacks on shipping about ten days ago. The stated purpose is to keep oil prices high until the American midterms on 3 November. They say operations will spread to the Gulf of Oman and beyond, and recent strikes off Qatar, the Emirates and Oman's Sohar anchorage suggest they already have. An American military official confirmed one change. With much of its coastal radar destroyed, the Revolutionary Guard now finds targets through spotters in small boats, and US forces destroyed one such dhow last week after ordering its crew off.

Washington tells a calmer story. On Monday the Energy Secretary told the oil congress in Riyadh that up to 14 million barrels a day cross Hormuz and that the crude problem is "still there but it's mostly handled". The last published tracker readings for the strait sit well below it. Kpler's last published reading, for the week to 5 October, put crude crossings at a little over 10 million barrels a day. That was 27 percent below the wartime high of the week before, in a week maritime security firms counted as the worst of the war for tanker attacks. Most of the fall came out of the ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman, while exports through the bypass pipelines climbed to 6.7 million barrels a day.

The two readings may be measuring different things. The secretary's percentage fits Gulf-wide crude including the pipelines better than it fits the strait alone, and the series behind it has never been published. The same quarrel ran in August, weeks before this surge, so it began as a dispute about measurement.

Underneath it sits the question that matters. One reading says Iran's retuned campaign is undoing September's recovery at the exact point where crude changes hulls. The other says Gulf producers are rerouting faster than Iran can chase them, so supply holds while the strait empties. Brent near 106 dollars says the shortage is real somewhere, and so does the secretary's own figure for refined products, which leave the Gulf at a quarter to a third of their pre-war volume. Kpler's October totals for the strait and for the region will show which reading the barrels support.

Tehran has tied its campaign to an election three weeks away. Washington has said it will not strike Iran again before that vote. The calendar now belongs to both of them.