The Trump Administration says more oil exited the Middle East this week than before the Iran war, but the data says otherwise

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright raised eyebrows in energy markets Wednesday when he said more oil exports left the Middle East on Monday—between the Strait of Hormuz and alternative routes—than before the beginning of the Iran war.

While crude oil exports have indeed risen in recent weeks—at least until an escalation of U.S. and Iranian attacks on Tuesday that slowed exports yet again—analytics firms that track tanker traffic rebutted Wright’s claims.

As the U.S. has worked to carve out a path for oil tankers that hews closer to Oman, more oil shippers are using smaller tankers to move through the narrow Strait of Hormuz and then transferring their volumes to larger tankers in the broader Arabian Sea, a process called ship-to-ship transfers.

That process can be time consuming over days, and it appears that Wright is adding up transfers over multiple days into a single day, said Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, jokingly calling it “mathemagics.”

Here’s what Wright initially had to say during an interview with CNBC:

“Monday was our record ever through, since the conflict began. Over 17 million barrels of oil flowed through the Strait of Hormuz on ships on Monday. If you add the bypass export pipelines, more than left the region [than] in the pre-conflict.”

Prior to the war, nearly 15 million........

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