I’m looking at the map about the strait of hormuz, I’ve looked up what made it so important and I still don’t get it. I thought that the reason there is so much conflict over it, was that I assumed it looked like it was a very integral passageway for ships to get in and out of. But looking at the map again, it only goes straight to into Kuwait.

What am I missing here? Couldn’t the ships just, not bother with that part and route through elsewhere?

    • makeshiftreaper@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      16 hours ago

      Airplanes are very time efficient but not very fuel efficient. A modern 737 cargo plane holds about 52,000 lbs of cargo. To transport 3 million barrels of oil (not even 20% of the total oil we’re talking about) by plane would take about 20,000 flights daily and there are only about 13,000 737s on the planet. So ignoring the astronomical cost it would take making the process impossible to profit from, you’d have to commandeer the world’s supply of planes to do so. Also I’m almost certain that the entire middle east couldn’t handle 20,000 fully loaded cargo flights every day. It’s simply too much for their airports to handle, even if humans stopped flying

    • Rhaedas@fedia.io
      2·
      16 hours ago

      Liquid is heavy. Just comparing freight weight capacity, a 777 can carry around 100 tons, while a large freight ship carries 200,000 tons. That’s a container ship, not an oil freighter, but you see the difference. We move things that can’t take weeks to ship on a plane and pay more for it, while boat shipping is cheap if you can wait for it. And for oil there (usually) is a long queue of ships coming and going, so it doesn’t matter about the time.