More than four fifths of everything the world trades by volume travels on water. Almost none of it travels freely. The whole system funnels through a handful of gaps — a few kilometres wide, some of them a few hundred metres — where geography, weather and politics can all reach the same valve at once.
2.8 km
Width of the Phillips Channel at its narrowest — the pinch point of the Strait of Malacca, through which roughly 22.5 million barrels of oil a day moved in 2024. It is the busiest oil chokepoint on Earth, and it is narrower than most cities are wide.
01 / The Doors
Seven gaps hold the map together
Draw the sea routes of global commerce and they collapse onto a small number of straits, canals and lock chambers. Marker size below is scaled to 2024 oil-and-products transit volume; the dashed line is the Cape of Good Hope detour that traffic takes when the Red Sea closes.
Schematic, not survey-accurate. Marker area ∝ 2024 crude + petroleum-liquids transit volume. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, World Oil Transit Chokepoints (updated Mar 2026). Detour distance: Shanghai–Rotterdam, Maritime Economics & Logistics, 2024.
02 / The Scale
From thirty-three metres to thirty-nine kilometres
The word "chokepoint" flattens an enormous range. The tightest constraint in world trade is not a strait at all — it is a concrete box in Panama 33.53 m across. Scale below is logarithmic, because the span covers three orders of magnitude.
Narrower ← tighter constraintWider → more sea room
33.5 m
Panamax lock chamber
205 m
Suez Canal channel (at depth)
~700 m
Bosporus at its tightest
2.8 km
Phillips Channel Strait of Malacca
~29 km
Bab el-Mandeb 18 miles
~39 km
Hormuz 21 miles
Sources: Panama Canal Authority (lock dimensions); Suez Canal Authority; U.S. EIA and Strauss Center (Hormuz, 21 miles, with two 2-mile-wide traffic lanes); EIA (Turkish Straits, under half a nautical mile at the narrowest). Usable fairway is narrower still than the geographic width in every case.
03 / The Flow
What moved through each door in 2024
Crude oil, condensate and refined products, in millions of barrels per day. Malacca and Hormuz together carried the equivalent of about 42% of world petroleum liquids consumption. The last bar is not a chokepoint — it is the open-water route ships take to avoid one.
Strait of MalaccaIndonesia / Malaysia / Singapore
22.5
Strait of HormuzIran / Oman
20.7
Cape of Good Hopethe detour, not a chokepoint
9.3
Danish StraitsBaltic exit
4.9
Suez Canal + SUMEDEgypt
4.8
Bab el-MandebYemen / Djibouti
4.1
Turkish StraitsBosporus + Dardanelles
3.6
Panama Canaloil & products only
2.0
Million barrels per day, 2024. World petroleum liquids supply in 2024 ≈ 103.3 Mb/d. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, World Oil Transit Chokepoints, updated March 2026.
04 / The Detour
When one door shuts, the ocean gets longer
After attacks on shipping in the Red Sea began in late 2023, tanker traffic swung away from Suez and around southern Africa. The two lines are close to mirror images — the cargo did not disappear, it just started burning far more fuel and time to arrive.
Suez Canal + SUMEDCape of Good Hope
Source: U.S. EIA, World Oil Transit Chokepoints, Mar 2026.
+4,575 nm
Added to a Shanghai–Rotterdam voyage routed around the Cape instead of through Suez — about 12 extra days at 16 knots
−75%
Fall in Suez Canal transit traffic in 2024 versus 2023; container shipping through the canal fell roughly 90%
13,200
Ships that transited the Suez Canal in 2024, down from about 26,400 the year before — Suez Canal Authority
05 / The Water
Panama's chokepoint runs on rain
The Panama Canal is not limited by width or politics so much as by fresh water. Every Panamax transit sends roughly 190 million litres of Gatún Lake's fresh water out to sea. In the 2023–24 drought the canal had to ration ships the way a city rations taps.
Daily transit slots as announced by the Panama Canal Authority through the 2023–24 El Niño drought; full capacity restored August 2024.
190M litres
Fresh water discharged to the sea per Panamax transit — about 50 million US gallons. Gatún Lake also supplies drinking water to more than half of Panama's population
−29%
Drop in deep-draft transits in fiscal 2024: 9,944 ships, carrying 423 million tons — Panama Canal Authority, FY24 results
$1.6B
Cost of the planned Río Indio reservoir to top up the canal's water supply; construction expected to begin 2027 and finish around 2032
06 / The Bill
What a closed door costs
A chokepoint disruption does not stop trade. It taxes it — in fuel, in days, in insurance, and in the national budget of whoever owns the gate.
$7B
Suez Canal revenue Egypt lost in 2024: receipts fell from $10.2bn to about $4.0bn, a drop of roughly 61% — Suez Canal Authority
12%
Share of all world trade that normally moves through the Suez Canal — and about 30% of global container traffic
80%+
Share of world merchandise trade by volume carried by sea; 12.3 billion tonnes shipped in 2023 — UNCTAD
Why it matters
Redundancy is a physical thing
The map of world trade looks like a web and behaves like a funnel. Two straits — Malacca and Hormuz — carry the equivalent of about 42% of the world's daily petroleum liquids. A third, Suez, carries roughly an eighth of all trade. None of them has a spare.
What 2023–2025 demonstrated is that the failure modes are unrelated to each other and can arrive together: Bab el-Mandeb closed for political reasons and Panama closed for meteorological ones in the same twelve months. The alternatives are real but expensive — the Cape route absorbed the Red Sea traffic, at the price of thousands of extra miles, extra ships tied up at sea, and extra fuel burned per container.
Watch the water, not just the warships. Gatún Lake's rainfall is now a global trade variable, and the fix is a $1.6bn reservoir that will not hold a drop before the 2030s.
Delivery dates are geography. When a shipment slips a fortnight, the cause is often a strait 8,000 km away, not a warehouse.
Slack is the product. Inventory buffers, dual sourcing and multi-port routing are the only civilian hedges against a gap 2.8 km wide.
Sources & notes
U.S. Energy Information Administration — World Oil Transit Chokepoints, last updated 3 Mar 2026. Transit volumes for Hormuz (21.8 Mb/d 2023, 20.7 Mb/d 2024), Malacca (24.0 / 22.5), Suez+SUMED (8.8 / 4.8; 4.9 in H1 2025), Bab el-Mandeb (9.3 / 4.1), Danish Straits (5.0 / 4.9), Turkish Straits (3.5 / 3.6), Panama Canal (2.2 / 2.0), Cape of Good Hope (6.2 / 9.3; 9.1 in H1 2025). World petroleum liquids supply 2024 ≈ 103.3 Mb/d.
Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, University of Texas — Strait of Hormuz: ~21 miles wide at its narrowest, with two 2-mile-wide traffic lanes separated by a 2-mile buffer.
U.S. EIA — The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is a strategic route for oil and natural gas shipments: 18 miles wide at its narrowest, with two 2-mile-wide channels.
Navigational and hydrographic references for the Strait of Malacca — Phillips Channel, ~2.8 km (1.7 miles) at its narrowest, near Singapore.
Panama Canal Authority (ACP) — original Panamax lock chamber dimensions (33.53 m wide); FY2024 financial results: 9,944 deep-draft transits, 423 million tons, total revenue 4.99bn PAB. Transit total down 29% versus FY2023.
Panama Canal Authority / CNBC (Sep 2025) — approximately 50 million US gallons (~190 million litres) of fresh water per Panamax transit; Gatún Lake supplies drinking water for more than half of Panama's population; Río Indio reservoir project estimated at $1.6bn, construction from 2027, completion around 2032.
Suez Canal Authority, via Ahram Online (Jan 2025) — 2024 canal revenue about $4.0bn versus $10.2bn in 2023 (−60.7%), roughly a $7bn shortfall; approximately 13,200 transits in 2024 versus 26,400 in 2023.
Maritime Economics & Logistics (Springer, 2024), The Red Sea Crisis: ramifications for vessel operations, shipping networks, and maritime supply chains — the Cape of Good Hope routing adds 4,575 nautical miles and about 12 days to a Shanghai–Rotterdam voyage at 16 knots.
UNCTAD — Review of Maritime Transport 2024: over 80% of world merchandise trade by volume moves by sea; seaborne trade reached 12.3 billion tons in 2023.
NOTES · The 2024 Suez traffic decline of ~75% (and ~90% for container shipping) is as reported by trade-credit and shipping analysts summarising Suez Canal Authority data; the "12% of world trade" and "~30% of global container traffic" figures are the standard SCA/industry characterisations of a normal year, not 2024 outturn. The Panama daily-slot chart plots announced transit slots at four reference dates, not a continuous daily series. The world map is schematic and hand-simplified; marker positions are approximate and coastlines are not survey-accurate.