NextFin News - Frontline chief executive Lars Barstad said tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz could rise quickly if the U.S. and Iran reach a stable agreement that reduces the risk of attacks on shipping. He said the route would still remain well below its former pace.
In an interview with CNBC this week, Barstad said he was “actually very optimistic” that transits would resume “pretty quickly” once the two countries found “some sort of agreement, at least not to attack shipping.” Frontline, headquartered in Cyprus and publicly listed, operates an 80-vessel fleet carrying crude oil and petroleum products worldwide.
Barstad said five Frontline tankers are currently stuck in the Persian Gulf because of the closure of Hormuz, correcting earlier reporting that suggested those ships were stranded in the broader Gulf under a blockade scenario. He described a narrower operational problem: Frontline is only allowing existing vessels to leave the Persian Gulf under safe escort, and there is no authoritative reporting that five tankers are trapped indefinitely. The issue, he said, is a temporary routing and security constraint rather than a permanent loss of assets.
His comments were less a market-wide call than a scenario from a shipping executive with direct commercial exposure. Frontline benefits when long-haul tanker routes are extended and utilization is tight, but its exposure to Hormuz also leaves it especially sensitive to any de-escalation. Barstad said some tanker operators have already positioned ships close to the Gulf to capture a possible reopening, comparing the strategy to holding “a call option on something that might happen.” He said Frontline has not pre-positioned vessels for an opening.
Barstad also said traffic through Hormuz would not return immediately to prewar conditions, when 130 to 140 vessels crossed daily. But he said a credible deal between the U.S. and Iran should still lift flows well above the current five to 10 ships a day. For oil exporters around the Gulf, even a partial normalization would matter. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other regional producers rely on Hormuz as the fastest route to Asia, and cargoes forced onto longer alternatives raise freight costs and reduce flexibility. A reopening would also ease the premium that has built into tanker routing, insurance and chartering decisions since the security shock.
The recovery Barstad described depends on a specific condition: not a broad diplomatic breakthrough, but an agreement credible enough to keep shipping from being targeted. That leaves the outlook exposed to any breakdown in talks, missile activity, or an individual attack on commercial vessels. Shipping markets have repeatedly shown how quickly a fragile calm can reverse. Operators that move ships toward the Gulf too early, assuming an imminent opening, could be left waiting, and the economics of keeping a vessel idle near Hormuz only work if the political signal is genuine. Barstad's comments point to an initial rebound in transits after any accord that would be sharp but limited, not a full return to normal.
For oil markets, Hormuz remains a critical chokepoint even when the immediate threat recedes. Nearly a fifth of global oil consumption passes through the strait in normal conditions, and any reopening would likely show up first in shipping rates and vessel positioning before reaching physical trade flows. For now, the clearest measure of that fragility is still the daily flow itself: five to 10 vessels, versus 130 to 140 before the war risk rose.
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