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What we track

Seven oil & gas shipping chokepoints:
ChokepointBaseline flow (mb/d)
Strait of Hormuz21.0
Strait of Malacca17.2
Suez Canal / SUMED7.6
Bab el-Mandeb6.2
Danish Straits3.0
Turkish Straits2.9
Panama Canal0.9
Baselines are EIA’s 2023 World Oil Transit Chokepoints publication. Two chokepoints (Turkish + Danish Straits) are not covered by common competitor sites — they show up here.

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How live flow is derived

Not an editorial estimate. Every published flow number is calibrated from real observations on a 6-hour refresh:
  1. Portwatch DWT — IMF / World Bank vessel-tracking aggregation produces per-chokepoint deadweight tonnage by vessel class.
  2. AIS-relay hazard matching — our AIS ingestion (Railway relay) tags vessels within 500 km of a chokepoint with observed disruption signals (GPS jamming, AIS-off, anchorage clusters, Red/Orange GDACS alerts).
  3. Flow estimate = current DWT ÷ 365-day baseline DWT, expressed as % of baseline.
  4. Confidence band = function of vessel sample size and disruption-signal density.
Refresh cadence: energy:chokepoint-flows:v1 (6h Railway cron) + supply_chain:chokepoints:v4 warm-ping (30 min).

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Status badge derivation

Each chokepoint has a derived public badge: normal | restricted | disrupted | closed. The badge is a deterministic function of:
  • Flow ratio (current mb/d ÷ baseline)
  • Active AIS disruption count within 500 km
  • War-risk tier (low / medium / high / extreme)
  • Active navigational warnings (NGA)
We do not publish a bare conclusion label (“sanctions-blocked”, “closed by Iran”, etc.) without the underlying evidence fields visible alongside.

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Every public number carries its grounds

Every chokepoint card exposes its provenance via a standard attribution footer:
  • Source type (ais for Portwatch + AIS, regulator for EIA baselines)
  • Sample size (N AIS observations)
  • Method (AIS-DWT calibrated)
  • Confidence band (high | medium | low)
  • Data freshness (Xh ago)
The footer is an HTMLElement with data-attr-source, data-attr-n, data-attr-confidence attributes so agents (MCP clients, scrapers, analyst tools) can extract the same provenance the eye can read.

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Known limits

  • AIS signal drops over heavily-jammed regions (Bab el-Mandeb, Hormuz). Gaps are surfaced as reduced confidence, not synthesized away.
  • Baselines are annual averages. Seasonal swings (e.g. Suez winter/summer) aren’t modeled yet.
  • No per-commodity breakdown (crude vs products vs LNG) at the strip level. Coming in a later release via the pipeline registry crosslink.

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Corrections

See /corrections for the planned revision-log shape — every badge transition will write an entry there once the classifier ships. If you spot a wrong number today, open a GitHub issue at the public repository. Corrections are handled manually in v1 and flow through the automated override-trigger path once the classifier is live.