VII Deliberate Deceptions used to Hide Oil Price Rigging
The Hormuz Oil Blockage has been the worst oil blockage in history both in terms of the amount of blockage (12 to 21 million barrels a day) and the length of the blockage (180 and counting). On average only 4 million barrels of oil have gone though the Strait per day for the past six months.
Nearly all of this has been oil heading for China – which has made a deal with Iran to let their oil through and warned the US not to bother their tankers. In addition, the oil going around the Strait through Saudi and UAE pipelines has averaged 3 to 4 million barrels a day. This leaves an average blockage of 21 MB/D minus 9 MB/D equals 12 MB/D for the past six months. Multiply 12 million barrels a day by 180 days and the US war against Iran has led to a total shortfall of more than 2.2 billion barrels of oil:
So far, this record shortfall has not been reflected in the price of oil. WHY?
Every day this historic oil blockage continues, this worldwide oil shortage is getting worse. Yet so far, we have only seen a 50% increase in the price of oil – from about $60 a barrel to about $90 a barrel. Despite the oil shortage getting worse every day, oil prices in July and August are 30% below their April and May peak:
Equally shocking, oil future contracts are calling for a rapid return to a normal oil supply and near normal oil prices – within just a few months.
So why is this record 2.2 billion barrel oil shortfall not reflected in either the current or future price of oil?
The answer is mega corruption combined with a tidal wave of deliberate deceptions. Those doing the rigging control the media and have used this control to spread at least seven deceptions to create an illusion of oil abundance and hide their price rigging crimes. Just as with the 40 Trump announcements that “A Peace Deal is just around the corner”, each time one or more of these deceptions are pushed out in the legacy media, the price of oil magically drops. The public believes these deceptions because we all suffer from normalcy bias… We want to believe that we are being told the truth. We want to believe that we have a normal market.
The problem with a rigged oil price market is that instead of higher prices causing the demand to go down, an artificially low price causes demand to remain high which then causes the supply to run out.
When the supply runs out, then result of price rigging is that oil prices will skyrocket rapidly, like a coil springing back into its proper place.
In this section, we will explain why each of these seven deceptions are not supported by the actual facts. The seven deliberate deceptions used to hide oil price rigging are:
#1 Dark Tankers are “turning off their Transponders” to escape detection by the Iranians
#2 US Miners have cleared the Strait of all Iranian Mines.
#3 The US Navy has guided hundreds or thousands of tankers through a secret Oman Passage.
#4 Expert reports confirm that a lot of oil is getting through or around the Strait of Hormuz
#5 Worldwide Strategic Oil Reserves made up for the Shortage
#6 The China Oil Miracle made up for the Hormuz Shortage
#7 The US Shale Oil Glut made up for the Hormuz Shortage
What all of these deliberate deceptions have in common is that there has been no actual evidence provided to support these claims – and equally important, there is a lot of evidence that all of these claims are false. Let’s compare these seven War Machine media narratives to the actual facts.
#1 Dark Tankers are “turning off their Transponders” to escape detection by the Iranians
Many have claimed that lots of tankers are simply turning off their positional transponders and sneaking through. This is why we can not see these tankers going around the tip of Oman when we go to Marine Traffic.com:
The problem with this claim is that the Iranians have access to both Russian and Chinese satellite imaging. They know exactly where every tanker is coming from and going to regardless of whether it has a transponder on and regardless of which side of the Strait of Hormuz it is on. Satellites bounce microwave pulses off the Earth's surface and measure the reflection. Large metal structures like 900 foot oil tanker hulls create extremely bright radar returns, allowing satellites to spot ships through heavy clouds and at night. There is no way to hide an oil tanker going through the Strait of Hormuz.
#2 US Miners have cleared the Strait of all Iranian Mines.
To begin with, the US Fleet does not have any modern Mine Sweepers. Their last four were decommissioned in 2025 since they were 30 years old. Equally important, the US fleet is likely way out in International Waters in the Arabian Sea at least 200 miles from the Iranian Coast in order to avoid Iranian missiles which have a range of over 400 miles.
In March, Iran used a series of remote placement methods to plant hundreds of various types of mines in the Strait of Hormuz. The US claims it is using “Seahawk” helicopters to locate and blow up the mines. The problem with this claim is that these helicopters do not have the range given they have no land bases and the aircraft carriers are too far away from the Strait of Hormuz. But even if the US somehow managed to locate and disable these hundreds of Iranian mines, it would not take Iran more than a couple of days to replace them with hundreds of additional mines that Iran has stockpiled over the past 20 years.
Maritime analysts estimate Iran has a stockpile of between 2,000 and 6,000 mines, many of them domestically produced. Scott Savitz, a senior engineer at the research institute RAND, who specialises in naval operations and technologies, said Iran possesses both traditional moored mines and more sophisticated mines. Iran has “the classic spiky balls that everyone envisions”, Savitz said, which are mines tethered to an anchor that explode when struck by a ship. “But it also has a number of influence mines. These sit on the seabed and are harder to detect.” At the end of August, after the US military claimed that there were no more mines in the Strait of Hormuz, a large Saudi tanker was disabled after it struck two mines in the Strait.
#3 The US Navy has escorted hundreds (or thousands) of tankers through a secret Oman Passage.
There is little evidence of the US Navy escorting more than a handful of tankers through the Oman side of the Strait. There is more evidence of Iranian missiles hitting tankers attempting to exit through the Oman side. For example, at the end of August, two large Saudi tankers – which were supposedly escorted by US Shipes - were struck by Iranian missiles.
#4 Expert reports confirm that a lot of oil is getting through or around the Strait of Hormuz
These expert reports, often from Wall Street bankers, have provided almost no actual evidence to support their claims. There are now many reliable groups, such as Hormuz Strait Tracker.com who are using real time satellite imaging to confirm and track every tanker going in and out of the Strait of Hormuz. They all agree that there are only a few tankers getting out each day (and average of 5 a day in August) and nearly all of these are going through the Iranian Toll Booth and then heading to China. Expert reports also commonly over-estimate the amount of oil coming through the Saudi East-West pipeline. The capacity is 7 MB/D. However, 2 MB/D is used for Saudi domestic refineries, leaving 5 MB/D available for export. In addition, various problems caused exports to peak at 4 MB/D in March and April. Since then, the biggest problem has been the Houthi Red Sea bottleneck which caused export to drop to 3 MB and by July, a 41% drop from the 4 MB/D peak putting the actual exports closer to 2 MB. The UAE pipeline is exporting a little over 1 MB/D.
We will combine the two pipelines and give the total 4 MB/D with this including the Saudi Oil piped through Egypt. But a single Houthi missile can take 2 MB of Saudi Oil offline in a matter of minutes.
#5 Worldwide Strategic Oil Reserves made up for the Shortage
A lot of press was devoted to the March 10, 2026 announcement that the world’s nations had committed to putting 400 million barrels of oil into the supply from their 32 nation combined Strategic Petroleum Reserves. But this story was also a major distortion of the facts. Below is a table constructed from the following three sources:
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/oil-stocks-of-iea-countries
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/korea/crude-oil-imports
https://www.iea.org/news/iea-confirms-member-country-contributions-to-collective-action-to-release-oil-stocks-in-response-to-middle-east-disruptions
Actual Oil Releases from Worldwide Strategic Oil Reserves
The above table does not include India or Pakistan both of which have their own unique problems. It also does not include China which we will cover next. The above table confirms that instead of 400 Million Barrels of oil being released over 180 days (more than 2 MB/D), the actual releases from the ten leading countries out of the 32 countries was only 248 million barrels. Divide this by 180 days and it comes to just over 1 million barrels a day – which is not nearly enough to address the actual shortfall of 12 to 14 million barrels a day.
But to add insult to injury, the US stockpile, rather than being used in the US as it was intended to be used was shipped entirely overseas to places like Netherlands, Italy, Turkey, the Philippines, New Zealand and Australia. So the reserves contributed by the Netherlands and Italy were double counted as they were actually from the US reserve.
#6 The China Oil Miracle made up for the Hormuz Shortage
The next misleading claim given for the stability of oil prices is the China Miracle. It has been claimed that China reduced its crude oil imports by various amounts up to and even exceeding five million barrels a day. No evidence has been provided to support these claims. Here is a graph of China Oil imports in 2026 compared to previous years:
Source: China Customs
In short, for the past 5 years, China has averaged 11 million barrels per day of imports. In April, 2026, this fell to 9 million barrels and then 8 million barrels in May and June. It rose to 9 million barrels in July and in August went back to 8 million barrels. So the claim that China reduced imports by 5 million barrels per day is not true. They reduced imports by about 3 million barrels per day. But in addition, they stopped exporting more than one million barrels of oil per day to make up for their reduced imports.
So the net difference available for other nations due to the China Miracle was only about 2 million barrels a day. Even this has been offset by the loss of about 1 million barrels a day from Russian Refineries put out of action by Ukranian drones. Adding back 1 million barrels a day from the world strategic oil reserves, this still leaves a likely record shortfall of 10 million barrels a day. This can also be stated as a 10% shortfall. By comparison, the 1973 OPEC oil embargo disrupted 7% of the global crude supply, yet prices skyrocketed by more than 130%. In addition, China’s net crude needs are only about 8 million barrels a day. The import surplus over 8 MB/D for the past several years was used to increase the China Oil Reserves which, according to the US Energy Information Administration are currently at 1.4 billion barrels.
China did not need to draw anything from their 1.4 billion barrel Oil Reserve. All they needed to do was stop exporting oil and briefly stop adding oil to their massive reserve. On March 5, 2026, the Chinese government ordered major refiners including Sinopec and Rongsheng Petrochemical to stop accepting new fuel export contracts, which meant refiners needed to process less crude to keep supplying the domestic market. And Chinese oil demand was already softening for a separate reason: more than half of all new cars sold in China in 2026 were electric, a shift that had already been cutting gasoline demand by roughly a million barrels a day.
According to a Rand Report, unlike the US Petroleum Reserve, the Chinese Reserve Sites are distributed all across their nation:
In addition to getting a lot of oil from Iran, China is also getting 20% of its oil from Russia. But the bottom line is that there was no China miracle.
#7 The US Shale Oil Glut made up for the Hormuz Shortage
The final and perhaps most misleading deception is the claim that the US has an endless supply of Shale Oil and thus, we do not need to worry about the Persian Gulf.
Beginning in 2010, Shale oil production turned the US from a net importer to a net exporter of oil. Since 2010, nine out of every ten barrels added to global hydrocarbon consumption have been from U.S. shale fields—whether as crude oil or natural gas. US Shale production has not merely helped in the world oil market; it has defined it.
For more than a decade, the world’s new oil barrels have hearly all been US shale oil barrels. This fact has led some to claim that the US does not need any of the oil from the Persian Gulf – and to even claim that the US Shale Oil will continue to expand and make up for whatever is lost from the Persian Gulf – and this is why long term oil futures contracts have remained so low.
These claims ignore the fact that the US Shale Oil boom peaked in 2024 and has been going down rapidly for the past two years.
Here is a quote from Benoit Morenne of Wall Street Journal on May 17, 2025:
“In just 15 years, shale companies have increased U.S. oil production by about 8 million barrels of oil a day. But in recent years, signs that the era of shale dominance is coming to an end have multiplied.”
According to the Energy Information Agency (EIA), shale oil production reached its peak in November 2024, at 9 million barrels per day. According to this report, shale oil and gas wells typically experience a decline rate of 50-70% in the first year of production. This steep initial decline is the single most important production characteristic investors must understand when evaluating shale well economics. Unlike conventional wells that might decline 10-20% annually, horizontal shale wells produce at exceptionally high initial rates before tapering rapidly.
According to this study, we only have a couple of years left until the US is back to being a net importer of oil. It was a study of production data of 30,000 shale oil wells in the Bakken, Eagle Ford shale field, and the Permian Basin. Here is a graph of the wells drilled in these fields:
Each new well drilled was significantly longer and deeper than earlier wells. Each well also rapidly lost capacity during each year of operation as is shown in this graph:
Oil production decreased rapidly in the first three years such that the monthly oil production rate after three years was only 19%, 11%, and 12% of peak oil in the Bakken, Eagle Ford, Permian shale.
After ten years' production, the oil rate in the average shale oil well was only 3% of the peak oil. In short, the US will not be saved by the Shale Oil boom. Instead of going up, shale oil production is certain to decline rapidly in the coming year.
What is really happening and why the truth matters
What is really happening is that because prices are being held artificially low, demand has remained high and because demand has remained high, the inventories of oil, gas and diesel are dropping to record lows. Here is a chart of US Gasoline storage at a record low:
Here is a chart of US Diesel storage at a record low:
Here is a chart of oil futures contract trading showing that trades depressing the oil price have been ocurring in the middle of the night rather than during the daily trading sessions:
In conclusion, there is an oil tanker load of evidence that oil price rigging is occuring and that oil, gas and diesel inventories are falling. All that is needed is a “trigger” for oil prices to spring back to the price it would have reached had it not been for the rigging. We maintain that the end of the US Strategic Reserve Oil Contracts will be that trigger.
These contracts have only 4 million barrels left to “loan” and then they will come to an end. We estimate that at 4 MB per week, the final contract will end on Friday September 4, 2026 – a date we call SPR Doomsday.
Because it was these oil contracts that were used to rig the oil price market, when the contracts are gone, it will not take long for the real price of oil to be discovered by the unrigged market forces.