It certainly hasn’t yet, as the New York Times reports:
A Greek-owned bulk carrier and a Liberia-flagged vessel crossed the strait on Wednesday, according to Kpler, a global ship-tracking firm. But there were also “no clear signs yet of large-scale positioning or queuing that would indicate ships are preparing to move through in significant numbers,” said Dimitris Ampatzidis, a senior risk and compliance analyst at Kpler. “Most operators appear to be holding back.”
It all comes down to how confident tanker owners feel about the risks, another expert told the Guardian’s Joanna Partridge:
Richard Meade, the editor-in-chief at the maritime data provider Lloyd’s List Intelligence, said the initial ceasefire agreement “doesn’t change the situation in the sense that Iran is still in control”. He added that it still required “ships to essentially seek permission, and that’s the key. That means that nothing has changed – no permission, no transit.” …
Meade added that some captains had been instructed by shipowners to carry out safety checks in readiness for a possible departure. However, he said large numbers of vessels were unlikely to start moving out of the Gulf until they were certain that they could do so safely: “We probably need to temper expectations of there being a mass exodus immediately.
“Until shipowners have got some sort of detail in terms of what’s required of them [to exit the strait] they are basically going to be waiting to see what happens,” he said. “At the moment, we’re seeing nothing to indicate that what was in place yesterday has changed.”
And as Axios’s Ben Gorman explains, even under the best circumstances, returning to the way things were is going to take a while:
“Confidence-building measures in coming days are going to be key to restoring shipments,” Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the financial services and consulting firm RSM US, said in an interview. He notes that insurance for the tankers will need to be reestablished, and that means figuring out the specific conditions Iran may impose, which remain murky right now. …
[T]his isn’t going to be a simple restart of the supplies that existed before the war. [R]estarting shuttered facilities and shut-in fields could take weeks to months,” ClearView Energy Partners said in a note. So don’t get too excited when you see gas pump prices edge down — it doesn’t mean everything’s back to normal. …
Another challenge is that Persian Gulf oil producers, lacking export routes, cut output by millions of barrels per day during the conflict. “Restarting production is a minor engineering feat and of itself,” Brusuelas said. And multiple oil and refining sites in producing countries were damaged during the war. Brusuelas predicts it will take three to six months to fully reach pre-war levels of regional production and refining.On the natural gas side, damage to liquefied natural gas exporting infrastructure in Qatar may take years to fully repair.
