Iranian crude oil exports have plunged in August as the U.S. leans on a naval blockade and economic pressure to force Tehran into a deal to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The numbers tell the story of who gets squeezed first: Tehran has loaded about 260,000 barrels per day for export at its ports so far this month, down more than 80% from 1.7 million bpd in August 2025, according to data shared Thursday by Kpler. Tehran’s crude loadings are also down about 70% in August from 893,000 bpd last month.
Who Pays for the Blockade
Oil exports are a crucial source of revenue for Iran, and the Trump administration believes Iran will eventually run out of money and have to capitulate, said Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy. That’s the logic of the squeeze. Not diplomacy, not compromise, but the slow tightening of a financial noose around a country’s main export lifeline.
President Donald Trump reimposed the blockade on July 14 in retaliation for Iran attacking oil tankers transiting the Hormuz Strait. The U.S. military has redirected 75 commercial ships, disabled three vessels and boarded two as of Thursday to enforce compliance with the blockade, Central Command said in a social media post. The apparatus doesn’t just threaten. It moves ships, boards them, and disables them.
Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kpler, said the blockade has been “very effective” and has “walloped Iran’s crude export loadings.” He said the crude Tehran is able to load on tankers probably doesn’t make it past the blockade. Smith said Tehran has about 20 million barrels of crude oil on tankers in Asia waiting to discharge to China, the main recipient of Iranian oil, and that Iran can probably store another 20 million barrels onshore before it runs out of space and its production is affected.
What the Powerful Call ‘Order’
Trump said Wednesday that the strait is functioning with 10 million barrels of oil exiting the waterway on Tuesday. Independent firms are seeing volumes much lower than the U.S. government’s figures. Kpler tracks between 5 million bpd and 6 million bpd of crude oil transiting the strait, Smith said, around a third of the 15 million bpd of crude that exited before the war started on Feb. 28. Windward estimates that exports through Hormuz rose to 5 million bpd in July compared with about 4 million bpd in June and 1.6 million bpd in May.
Trump has shifted to a campaign of economic warfare against Iran after a dozen waves of airstrikes in July failed to force Tehran to abandon its claim to control Hormuz. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday announced a plan to sever the Islamic Republic’s financial connections around the world. Bessent told CNBC last Thursday, “We have the blockade and we are going to have the toughest sanctions in history. It worked in Venezuela once we put up the blockade. It is working in Cuba right now and it is going to work in Iran, and we are going to collapse this regime.”
Bessent’s launch of “Operation Economic Outcast” against Iran on Monday was light on specifics, and Jeremy Paner, who worked on Iran sanctions at the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control from 2007 to 2013, said the campaign represents a major departure in U.S. policy. Paner said, “Instead of saying we’re going limit the revenue, they’re saying we’re going to completely economically isolate Iran. That had never been the goal of the U.S economic sanctions. Bessent saying that is a big deal.”
The Financial Net Tightens
Iran has remained defiant, rejecting U.S. demands and calling on the Trump administration to accept its conditions for Hormuz to reopen. Two tankers have come under attack this week in Hormuz and near Oman. Tehran is negotiating with Oman to share control of the strait potentially with some type of fee, a system the U.S. and its allies reject. Michelle Wiese Bockmann, senior maritime intelligence analyst at Windward, said the U.S. military is helping tankers from allied Gulf nations transit Hormuz through a southern corridor along Oman’s coast, and that as the southern corridor scales, Iran loses its leverage.
The Trump administration is also taking steps to limit an Egyptian bank’s operations in the United Arab Emirates, accusing the financial institution of serving as an economic lifeline to Tehran’s leadership as the U.S. war against Iran reaches the six-month mark. Under a new rule proposed Friday by the Treasury Department, the Emirati branches of Banque Misr, Egypt’s second-largest bank, would be severed from access to the U.S. financial system. The rule will be subject to a 30-day public comment period before it takes effect.
Scott Bessent said in a statement Friday, “The Trump administration warned that Iran’s enablers cannot continue to enjoy access to the U.S. dollar and the global financial system. Banque Misr UAE decided to find out the hard way, and today, we are taking the first step in holding it accountable for its continued, egregious support of the Iranian regime.” Egypt’s foreign ministry and central bank confirmed knowledge of the new rulemaking and are communicating with U.S. officials, according to a statement issued by the Central Bank of Egypt on Friday. The statement said the measure is limited to the bank’s branches in the UAE and only to its dollar transfers, and does not affect any other Egyptian bank or Banque Misr’s operations inside Egypt or any of its overseas branches.
Also Friday, the U.S. Treasury Department posted new sanctions on the bank manager of the Dubai branch of Iran’s Bank Melli and a Hong Kong-based firm that the U.S. accuses of helping launder funds for Iran. Bessent is set to represent the U.S. next week at Group of 20 finance ministers meetings, where he will meet individually with counterparts from the world’s major and developing economies to encourage participation in the economic isolation of Iran. The pressure campaign keeps widening, and the people at the bottom of the chain keep paying for decisions made far above them.