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Red Sea Watch

Houthi pressure on Red Sea shipping: Bab el-Mandeb transit, territorial control, and the Cape of Good Hope diversion.

Read this page as the routing risk behind the sour price: the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb decide whether Gulf crude reaches Europe and Asia on time or diverts around the Cape of Good Hope at record freight. Houthi claims are carried as claims, not confirmed incidents, and each bullet says which. Vessel counts are proxies for volume, and the quarterly official series lags.

The Red Sea is the back door for Gulf sour barrels to Europe and the long way around to Asia, so its closure pushes those barrels onto longer routes at record freight and pushes European refiners onto substitute sours. That substitution is what keeps the bid under Atlantic Basin heavies like Mars and Western Canadian Select (WCS) while Yanbu loadings are suspended. If the East-West pipeline restart holds and Bab el-Mandeb transits recover, European sour demand normalizes and the support under WCS fades.

Updated September 24, 2026 · refreshes weekly

September 2026 escalation

• Saudi Arabia restarted its East-West Pipeline (Petroline) on September 22, 2026 after a nine-day shutdown triggered by drone attacks on September 13, with the line pumping at a low rate and Saudi Aramco seeking to return toward about 4 million barrels per day, roughly 4% of global oil supply; one crude cargo was scheduled to load at Yanbu later that Tuesday bound for China, and the restart pressured Brent crude futures down more than $2 a barrel to their lowest since September 8.
  Sep 22, 2026; accessed 2026-09-24 Mettis Global (citing Reuters)
• Before the attack, the East-West Pipeline carried roughly 5.5 million barrels per day, of which about 4.5 million barrels per day of crude was exported through Yanbu to Mediterranean and northwest European refiners without routing through the Strait of Hormuz or Bab el-Mandeb; Houthi forces struck multiple pumping stations across two regions of Saudi Arabia on September 10, no crude has loaded from Yanbu since September 11, and terminal inventories were estimated to cover only three to five days of loadings at normal rates.
  Published ~Sep 20, 2026; accessed 2026-09-24 World Ports Organization
• The Houthis claimed on September 23 that they struck the Saudi oil tanker Wafa with ballistic missiles off the coast of Yanbu, calling the strike precise but giving no details of damage or casualties; the claim was not independently verified and Saudi authorities did not immediately respond. The Houthi spokesperson also claimed eight Saudi oil tankers have been targeted since the campaign began with 29 others forced to turn back, figures that are self-reported.
  Claim dated Sep 23, 2026; accessed 2026-09-24 Madhyamam Online (citing Al-Masirah TV)
• The Houthis said they targeted the Saudi oil tanker Amzan in the Red Sea off Yanbu with a ballistic missile and drones earlier in the week; unlike the later claims, this incident drew confirmation from the Saudi side, with Saudi shipping company Bahri stating its Amzan vessel was involved in a hostile incident in regional waters.
  Reported ~Sep 21, 2026; accessed 2026-09-24 Webull (news wire)
• Traffic through Bab el-Mandeb stayed volatile but open: 22 commodity vessels crossed on Tuesday, September 22 (14 toward the Red Sea, 8 toward the Gulf of Aden), below the 10-day average of about 26 but well above the single-digit levels seen through the Strait of Hormuz over the same weekend.
  ~Sep 22, 2026; accessed 2026-09-24 Walaw (citing Reuters shipping data)

Freight, routing, and price knock-ons

• With Yanbu loadings suspended, Saudi Aramco cancelled or delayed some September crude cargoes to European refiners, which may need to source alternative barrels from the Americas, the North Sea, and Africa at higher freight costs; Kpler estimates cited at the time put Yanbu inventories below 15 million barrels, enough for only about four days of exports at 3.5 million barrels per day.
  Published Sep 17, 2026; accessed 2026-09-24 TankTerminals (citing OilPrice.com)
• The Suez Canal Authority (SCA) reported that 5,874 vessels carrying 247.2 million tons transited the canal from July through mid-September 2026, generating $1.97 billion in revenue, up 5.2% in vessel count, 14.4% in tonnage, and 17.5% in revenue versus the same period last year; chairman Ossama Rabiee also projected canal revenue reaching about $8 billion in fiscal year 2026/27.
  Published ~Sep 15, 2026; accessed 2026-09-24 State Information Service Egypt (quoting the Suez Canal Authority)
• COSCO Shipping Lines made its first southbound Suez transit since the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb tensions disrupted patterns, with the 24,188 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) OOCL Portugal sailing from Belgium to China on September 16; the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) said container-ship net tonnage through the canal reached about 72.1 million tonnes in January-August 2026, up 54.2% year on year, and that services by CMA CGM, Maersk, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), Hapag-Lloyd, and COSCO have returned to the canal on Europe-Asia trades.
  Published ~Sep 21, 2026; accessed 2026-09-24 Container News (citing the Suez Canal Authority)
• War-risk pricing has split into tiers rather than one Red Sea number: indicative premiums for the southern Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb rose above 1% of vessel value from about 0.3% a week earlier, Saudi-linked voyages were quoted as high as 3%, while the northern Saudi Red Sea ports of Jeddah and Yanbu were quoted around 0.1%, a markedly different near-term risk profile.
  ~Sep 23, 2026; accessed 2026-09-24 Ship Universe
• Xeneta analyst Peter Sand said ocean freight is unlikely to return to Suez at scale for the rest of 2026, warning that renewed Houthi attacks would shelve any phased return; he estimates the Cape of Good Hope routing absorbs about 2.5 million TEU of the global 34 million TEU boxship fleet, shrinking available capacity by roughly 7%. Separately, leading protection and indemnity (P&I) clubs and their reinsurers are pulling war-risk cover for much of the Gulf region, effectively putting the Arabian Gulf off-limits for insurance purposes.
  ~Sep 23, 2026; accessed 2026-09-24 Infomarine (citing Maritime Executive / Xeneta)

International response

• UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham said on September 21 that Britain would provide limited military support to Saudi Arabia, with the Royal Air Force (RAF) supplying defensive air-to-air refueling for Saudi aircraft on missions countering Houthi missile and drone attacks; the agreement runs for a matter of weeks and will be kept under review. The United States, which bombed the Houthis under the Biden and Trump administrations, has shown no interest in getting involved militarily this time.
  Sep 21, 2026; accessed 2026-09-24 SRN News (citing the Associated Press)

Baseline: Bab el-Mandeb in 2026

• Weekly transit volume through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait grew from 1.1 million to 1.5 million metric tons (roughly 32 to 38 vessel transits) between January and July 2026 as Hormuz disruption pushed traffic south, but contracted to 25 weekly transits carrying about 750,000 metric tons after Houthi missile strikes resumed in July; for scale, pre-October 2023 traffic averaged about 80 vessels and 3.4 million metric tons per week, so Red Sea shipping is still below a third of its old normal.
  Data: Jan-Jul 2026 and pre-2023 baseline; accessed 2026-09-24 Africa Center for Strategic Studies

For the WCSB book, the Red Sea is freight and substitution: watch Bab el-Mandeb transit counts and Yanbu loading resumption for the earliest sign that Gulf sour is reaching Europe normally again. While the reroute persists, record very large crude carrier (VLCC) rates keep delivered sour expensive and Canadian barrels relatively bid. The pipeline restart is fragile, so treat the recovery as a signal, not a settlement.

Standing watch

What the daily feed updates on this page.

• Daily Bab el-Mandeb vessel transit counts (Kpler / Vortexa / Reuters tracking)
• Houthi territorial moves along Yemen's Red Sea coast (Mocha, Perim, Hanish islands)
• Houthi attack claims vs UKMTO/JMIC-confirmed incidents on shipping
• Suez Canal transits and carrier restoration of Red Sea sailings
• Cape of Good Hope traffic levels as the diversion gauge
• VLCC spot rates on MEG–Asia routes and USGC–Asia routes
• War-risk insurance premiums for southern Red Sea transits
• Saudi export routing shifts (Yanbu loadings, East-West pipeline flows)
• East-West Pipeline pumping rates and Yanbu crude loading resumption (Reuters / Kpler).
• Houthi attack claims on Saudi-linked tankers vs Bahri, UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO), and Joint Maritime Information Center (JMIC) confirmation.

Gaps

• No single verified series for daily Bab el-Mandeb oil volume in September 2026, trackers report vessel counts, EIA reports quarterly volumes with a lag.
• Houthi merchant-ship count claims (408 ships Sep 11–21) are self-reported and not independently verified.
• Exact per-route freight surcharge pass-through to delivered crude prices is estimated, not measured.
• No verified current count of how many Houthi attacks on vessels have occurred in 2026 specifically targeting tankers vs other shipping.
• No independent confirmation of Houthi tanker-hit claims (Wafa, Amzan) or the claimed tally of eight Saudi tankers struck and 29 turned back.
• Repair timeline for the East-West Pipeline pumping stations is unverified; estimates range from weeks to six-plus weeks and the effective restart rate is unknown.
• No public breakdown of where Saudi Gulf-terminal loadings went during the Petroline outage, limiting the Europe-vs-Asia crude split read.

Sources