Kandla20,000 tonnes of Qatari liquefied petroleum gas reached Gujarat.
The strait carries one-fifth of global energy and has been disrupted since US and Israel strikes on Iran in February.
13 India-flagged vessels have crossed since March; one was attacked off Oman on May 13.
Sources: The Hindu
THE BOTTLENECK
Hormuz is 33 km wide at its narrowest, but the shipping lanes are just 3 km each — two inbound, two outbound, separated by a 3 km buffer. Roughly 21 million barrels of oil-equivalent pass through daily, about a fifth of global energy trade.
WHY LPG NOT OIL
Liquefied petroleum gas — propane and butane — is what fuels Indian kitchens. Roughly 300 million Indian households cook on subsidised LPG cylinders under the Ujjwala scheme. India imports over 60% of its LPG, and Qatar and the UAE are its top suppliers — every cargo that clears Hormuz is a cooking-fuel cargo as much as an energy one.
THE QATAR ROUTE
Qatar's Ras Laffan complex is the world's largest LPG export terminal, and almost every molecule leaving it must transit Hormuz — Qatar has no Indian Ocean coastline. Unlike Saudi Arabia (East-West pipeline to the Red Sea) or the UAE (Habshan-Fujairah to the Gulf of Oman), Qatar has no bypass. The strait is not a chokepoint for Doha; it is the only door.
WHY IT CAN'T BE BYPASSED
Saudi Arabia built the East-West Pipeline (5 million bbl/day capacity) partly as a Hormuz hedge, and the UAE built the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline. Together they could reroute maybe a third of Gulf crude. LPG has even less optionality — gas pipelines are scarce, and the existing bypasses are oil-only.
THE INSURANCE CHOKEPOINT
Lloyd's of London war-risk premiums — not the attacks themselves — are what closes a shipping lane. After the May 13 attack off Oman, premiums on Gulf-transit hulls reprice within hours. Once they spike past a threshold, commercial vessels reroute or refuse the voyage regardless of how many tankers actually got hit. The financial chokepoint is tighter than the physical one.
THE TANKER WAR PRECEDENT
From 1984 to 1988, Iran and Iraq attacked over 400 commercial ships in the Gulf. Oil prices spiked briefly but markets adapted — tankers were reflagged under US and Kuwaiti flags and escorted by warships. The lesson planners took: disruption is easier to threaten than to sustain. India's choice to flag vessels under its own registry and send them through anyway is the modern echo of that reflagging playbook.