Maritime Chokepoints Compared: Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Malacca, Suez and Panama by Traffic and Risk
A maritime chokepoint is a narrow passage that a large share of seaborne trade has to pass through because the alternatives are much longer or don’t exist. Five matter most to world trade: the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab el-Mandeb, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Malacca and the Panama Canal. They differ a lot. Hormuz is about energy, Malacca about sheer volume, Suez and the Bab el-Mandeb work as one Europe-Asia corridor, and Panama is a freshwater-fed canal that fails in droughts. This page compares them on width, flows and risk, and sets out where each stands as of October 2026, a year in which two of the five have been at war.
Oil figures below are for the first half of 2025, the last full period before the Iran war started on 28 February 2026, so they show each route’s normal weight. Status notes reflect early October 2026.
The five chokepoints side by side
| Hormuz | Bab el-Mandeb | Suez Canal | Malacca | Panama Canal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Narrowest point | 39 km (21 nmi); each shipping lane 2 nmi wide | About 26 km, split by Perim island | Canal 205-225 m wide, 193 km long | 2.8 km at the Phillip Channel near Singapore | Lock chambers 55 m wide (Neopanamax) |
| Oil flow, 1H25 | 20.9 million b/d, about a fifth of world consumption | 4.2 million b/d (9.3 in 2023) | 4.9 million b/d with the SUMED pipeline (8.8 in 2023) | 23.2 million b/d, the largest oil chokepoint | 2.3 million b/d |
| LNG | 11.4 Bcf/d, over 20% of world LNG trade | Near zero since 2024 | Near zero since 2024 | About 9.2 Bcf/d | Small; mostly US cargoes to Asia |
| Vessel traffic | About 21 tankers a day pre-war, plus LNG, container and bulk ships | About 75 ships a day before November 2023, about 31 since early 2024 | Over 20,600 transits in 2021; monthly transits fell from 2,068 (Nov 2023) to 877 (Oct 2024) | Over 94,000 vessels a year in a widely used 2008 count; higher now | 13,404 transits in 2025 |
| Main risk now | War, mines, selective passage, war-risk insurance | Houthi missile and drone attacks; Houthi control of the eastern shore | Inherits Red Sea risk; groundings | Congestion, petty piracy, collisions | Drought and low Gatun Lake levels |
| Bypass | Saudi East-West and UAE Habshan-Fujairah pipelines; Iraq’s Kirkuk-Ceyhan line | Cape of Good Hope; Saudi exports via Yanbu still need the Red Sea | Cape of Good Hope; SUMED for some crude | Lombok and Makassar straits; Sunda Strait for smaller ships | US rail land bridge; Suez routing; Cape Horn |
Bcf/d is billion cubic feet a day. Oil flows are crude plus petroleum products.
Strait of Hormuz
Hormuz links the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar and Iran ship most of their exports through it, and most of it goes east to Asia. The traffic separation scheme sits in Omani waters, with two 2-nautical-mile lanes and a 2-mile buffer between them. Before 2026 the main bypasses were Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea and the UAE’s line to Fujairah outside the strait. The US Energy Information Administration put their available capacity at about 4.7 million b/d, a fraction of normal flows. Qatar’s LNG has no bypass at all.
Status, October 2026. The strait has been in crisis since US and Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February 2026. Within days tanker traffic fell to near zero, insurers pulled protection and indemnity cover, and QatarEnergy declared force majeure. Brent passed $100 on 8 March. A ceasefire in April failed, the US began blockading Iranian ports on 13 April, and a June memorandum between Washington and Tehran briefly lifted transits before Iran declared the strait closed again on 12 July. The US reimposed its blockade in mid-July. EIA estimates Hormuz oil flows fell from 14.9 million b/d in the first quarter of 2026 to 4.9 million b/d in the second.
Passage now depends on who you are. Iran has let some Chinese, Indian, Turkish and Pakistani ships through and created a Persian Gulf Strait Authority in May; Western officials and the shipping press have reported toll payments to the Revolutionary Guards, which the US says it will not accept in any settlement. Windward counted 55 AIS-visible transits in the week of 16 to 23 September, about 94% below pre-war levels, and 13 on 4 October. Eight merchant ships were struck between 28 September and 4 October. Flow estimates vary widely because many ships cross with transponders off, but the strait is open only in a narrow, selective sense. Brent was around $100 on 5 October.
Bab el-Mandeb
The “Gate of Tears” joins the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, between Yemen on one side and Djibouti and Eritrea on the other. Perim island splits it into a narrow eastern channel and a western channel about 20 km wide. Everything heading for the Suez Canal from Asia, the Gulf or East Africa passes here, so the strait and the canal behave as one system.
Status, October 2026. Houthi attacks began in November 2023 and have now run, with pauses, for nearly three years. They paused after the Gaza ceasefire in October 2025, then resumed against Israel on 28 March 2026 during the Iran war. On 20 July 2026 the Houthis declared a blockade of Saudi ports and Saudi ships, and seven vessels had diverted within two days. Houthi forces have since taken Mokha and the Dhubab district including Perim island, giving them both shores of the narrow eastern channel. Traffic has not stopped: Windward counted 42 crossings on 4 October, the same day explosions were reported near a tanker about 60 nautical miles south of Mokha. But volumes are far below the 2023 level, and LNG carriers have mostly stayed away since 2024.
Suez Canal
The canal runs 193 km from Port Said to Suez with no locks, and it takes ships up to about 20 m draft. The SUMED pipeline alongside it can move 2.5 million b/d of crude from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, which lets very large tankers unload part of their cargo and transit lighter. The Red Sea corridor normally carries roughly a tenth of world trade.
Status, October 2026. Suez revenue fell from $9.4 billion in the 2022/23 fiscal year to $7.2 billion in 2023/24, and monthly transits dropped by more than half. Red Sea traffic was still well under half its 2023 level in May 2026, before the Houthis widened their campaign to Saudi shipping. The Suez Canal Authority keeps hosting showcase transits of large container ships and meeting carriers about a return, but much of the Asia-Europe trade that left in 2024 still goes around the Cape of Good Hope. The Cape adds about ten days to a typical Asia-Europe voyage, and that extra time ties up ships, which is why freight rates and demurrage charges climb whenever the Red Sea flares up. The canal itself works normally. The problem is getting to its southern entrance.
Strait of Malacca
Malacca runs between Malaysia and Indonesia’s Sumatra and narrows to 2.8 km at the Phillip Channel in the Singapore Strait. It is the shortest route between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific and carries more oil than Hormuz, because Gulf crude bound for China, Japan and South Korea passes Hormuz first and then Malacca. It also carries a large share of the container trade between East Asia and everywhere west of it. “Malaccamax” (about 20.5 m draft) is the size limit set by its depth; bigger ships use the Lombok and Makassar straits through Indonesia.
Status, October 2026. Malacca is busy and functioning normally. The steady risk is low-level crime. ReCAAP, the regional anti-piracy centre, counted 133 piracy and armed robbery incidents across Asia in 2025 and 51 so far in 2026, with the Singapore Strait the main hotspot and most cases in the least serious category: theft from ships underway, often of engine spares. The bigger worry is strategic. China calls its dependence on the strait the “Malacca dilemma”, and any wider conflict in the South China Sea would put Malacca’s traffic at risk in a way local piracy never has.
Panama Canal
Panama is the only one of the five that depends on rain. Each lock transit uses fresh water from Gatun Lake, so a dry year means fewer slots and shallower drafts. Neopanamax locks, opened in 2016, take ships up to 366 m long, 49 m wide and about 15 m draft. The canal handles roughly 5% of world trade, much of it US grain, LNG and LPG heading to Asia and Asian goods heading to the US East Coast.
Status, October 2026. The canal is cutting capacity again. In the 2023 drought daily transits fell from a normal 36 to 22 by December 2023. A new El Niño has brought below-normal rain to the watershed in 2026. From 3 September the Panama Canal Authority cut Neopanamax slots to 9 a day and Panamax slots to 25, then to 23 from 15 September, and it postponed planned increases in maximum draft. Politics added a second layer: after US pressure over Chinese influence, Panama cancelled CK Hutchison’s concessions at the canal’s ports, and the Panama Maritime Authority took over their operation on 23 February 2026. Longer term, the canal authority is planning a new reservoir to feed Gatun Lake.
Three more worth watching
Turkish Straits (Bosporus and Dardanelles). The Bosporus is about 700 m wide at its narrowest and runs through central Istanbul. More than 45,000 vessels used the Turkish Straits in 2024, and about 3.7 million b/d of oil, mostly Russian and Kazakh crude. The 1936 Montreux Convention lets Türkiye limit warship passage in wartime, which it has done since 2022.
Danish Straits. The Great Belt, Little Belt and Øresund carry about 4.9 million b/d, much of it Russian oil from Baltic ports, and they are where the shadow fleet of older tankers moving Russian crude outside Western sanctions meets NATO navies. Several of the incidents in the undersea cable damage log involved ships on this route.
Taiwan Strait. At 126 km at its narrowest it is not a chokepoint in the physical sense, but it is a main lane for ships moving between Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, Europe and the Middle East. A blockade or large-scale exercise would push traffic east of Taiwan, adding time rather than closing a route.
How to read chokepoint risk
Most disruptions do not close a passage outright. They raise insurance premiums, make carriers route around, and slow everything down. Hormuz in 2026 is the extreme case of a strait that was “legally open, effectively closed” for weeks. When ships divert, the costs show up in voyage length, freight rates and contract terms, from bill of lading variants that set who bears delay risk to the letters of credit that fall out of date when cargo arrives late.
Three things to watch for the rest of 2026: transit counts at Hormuz (not announcements) as US-Iran talks continue; whether Houthi control of Perim changes how carriers price the Bab el-Mandeb; and Gatun Lake levels as Panama’s rainy season ends in December. For the case that the next big disruption may come from somewhere other than Hormuz, see maritime chokepoints after Hormuz. For the sanctions side of the shadow fleet and Iranian oil, see sanctions regimes compared: US, EU, UK and UN.