Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Tuesday that oil exports from the Middle East rose above pre-war levels on Sunday and have been right around normal for a week — a highly dubious claim that does not appear to be backed up by observable shipping traffic.

Wright said in a post on X that the oil flows were restored to normal levels after the US military coordinated a plan with allied Gulf nations to get crude through the Strait of Hormuz and Middle Eastern countries bypassed the waterway via pipelines or other export facilities.

It’s not clear how Wright arrived at that conclusion. Just 84 total vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz last week — including only nine on Sunday, according to Kpler, an oil market data service that uses satellite imagery and shipping transponders to provide up-to-date crude flow information. That’s down from more than 100 transits a day before the war and not nearly enough to carry the 9 million barrels per day through the strait that Wright claims has been traveling through the waterway.

Oil is getting out of the strait – but the number is closer to 4 million barrels per day, according to JPMorgan.

“It is not possible to reconcile the disparity between what we see and what he is quoting,” said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kpler.

The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment.

Wright’s claim that 5 to 7 million barrels per day are bypassing the Strait of Hormuz via pipelines appears to be accurate. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline alone has rerouted upward of 5 million barrels of oil per day to the Red Sea. Despite threats of a blockade of the Red Sea’s Bab-al-Mandeb strait from Iran’s Houthi allies, ship traffic has been flowing at a close-to-normal clip through that waterway in recent weeks.

Wright has claimed that 15 million barrels per day left the Arabian Gulf region over the past week and that 20 million barrels of oil left on Sunday, which would be higher than the pre-war average.

Middle Eastern countries have maxed out their pipeline capacity to reroute as much oil as possible around the Strait of Hormuz. So it’s hard to reconcile Wright’s bold claims with the physical limitations of the region’s infrastructure and the observable ship traffic through the Gulf’s waterways.

On Monday, a total of 6 vessels transited the strait: 4 inbound and 2 outbound, noted Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates. None of those ships were crude oil tankers.

Jawboning prices lower

“In theory, the US government with all its technology and all the military assets they have in the region should have the best number on the flow through the strait,” said Dan Pickering, founder and chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners. “But this is hard to verify. The administration is really trying to jawbone oil prices to the downside, as they have been doing for months.”