The Strait of Hormuz is 6,000 kilometres from Abuja. Your fuel bill didn’t get that memo.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated air strikes on Iran under what was designated Operation Epic Fury. Within 48 hours, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. The strait handles roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day, that’s about 20 percent of global seaborne oil trade and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard began boarding and attacking merchant ships, laying sea mines, and issuing warnings forbidding passage.
What followed was the kind of energy crisis that most economists had modelled as a tail risk scenario. It stopped being a scenario on March 4.
The IEA has called this the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Global oil supply plummeted by 10.1 million barrels per day to 97 million barrels per day in March, with continued attacks on energy infrastructure and ongoing restrictions on tanker
movements through the Strait. Brent crude, which was trading around $55 a barrel before the conflict, surged past $120 per barrel as markets priced in direct attacks on Iranian energy infrastructure, with analysts at Wood Mackenzie warning that $200 per barrel was not outside the realm of possibility.
This is not an ordinary price spike. It’s a structural rupture.
The chokepoint that finally choked In 2024, around 84 percent of the crude oil and condensate shipments through the Strait of
Hormuz were destined for Asian markets. China received a third of its oil through the strait. Japan sourced about 94 percent of its crude from the Middle East. India depended on the region for nearly 60 percent of its petroleum imports. When the strait closed, the supply chain didn’t reroute, it collapsed.
Asian countries were among the worst hit. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Vietnam faced severe shortages. Bangladesh is projected to face recession-like conditions. In India, the gas shortage shuttered ceramics factories in Gujarat and forced Mumbai restaurants to close or cut
operations. Japan released 80 million barrels from strategic reserves in March, equivalent to 15 days of domestic demand.
Europe didn’t escape. According to the IEA, the global natural gas market was significantly affected by disruptions in the Middle East, resulting in a short-term supply shock and reduced availability of LNG globally, with markets projected to remain tight through 2026 and 2027.
Meanwhile, one country has been doing rather well.
The US benefits from surging oil prices as an energy powerhouse. In April 2026, US exports of crude and petroleum products rose to nearly 12.9 million barrels a day. American shale producers, who had been squeezed by low prices before the conflict, are running at full capacity.
Trump’s hostility to OPEC now looks like less of a rhetorical posture and more of a strategic bet.
A Middle East in flames, with a blocked strait and $120 oil, is genuinely good for American energy producers even as it devastates American consumers at the pump. The contradiction at the heart of US energy policy has never been sharper.
Nigeria: A two-speed story
Nigeria is producing oil into one of the strongest price environments in years. Nigeria’s large Dangote Refinery has increased production to help meet global shortages, with the government and oil companies profiting from the crisis. But ordinary citizens are not expected to benefit immediately, due to transport cost increases.
The Dangote Petroleum Refinery has been rapidly scaling up, selling 12 cargoes totalling 456,000 tonnes of refined products, mainly petrol to Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Tanzania, Ghana, and Togo. That’s a genuinely significant development. For the first time in decades, Nigeria is moving toward being a regional refining hub rather than an exporter of crude that returns as expensive imported fuel.
But the structural problem hasn’t gone away. Nigeria’s economy is still dependent on oil for roughly 70 percent of government revenue and over 80 percent of foreign exchange earnings.
When global oil prices spike or crash, Nigeria’s entire fiscal framework is thrown into disarray. A windfall today doesn’t fix the dependence that makes the next shock equally ruinous.
The World Bank has projected that inflation in the developing world will average 5.1 percent in 2026; a full percentage point higher than expected before the war with developing economies growing 3.6 percent, down 0.4 percentage points since January.
The World Bank’s chief economist stated that the war is hitting the global economy in cumulative waves; first energy prices, then food prices, then inflation, pushing up interest rates and making debt more expensive. For Nigeria, which is already managing high debt service
costs and a battered naira, those waves land hard.
What the crisis exposed
The Iran-US conflict did something that decades of energy policy conferences failed to do; it made the cost of dependence legible to everyone at once.
Every country that had built its energy system around the assumption of uninterrupted Gulf flows now has a problem. Sub-Saharan Africa has one of the world’s lowest refining-to-production ratios, a structural vulnerability that leaves the continent exposed to distant geopolitical shocks. Nigeria is a producer, but it still imports refined products. That paradox, already embarrassing in peacetime, is now a crisis-level liability.
The long-term lessons are obvious even if they take years to act on: domestic refining capacity, strategic reserves, energy diversification. Nigeria has started down that road with Dangote’s plant. The question is whether this crisis provides the political will to go further rehabilitating the Port Harcourt and Warri refineries, building gas-to-power infrastructure, and treating the Petroleum Industry Act less like legislation and more like a mandate to execute.
For policymakers, the conflict has condensed decades of discourse on energy transition into weeks of existential urgency. It’s a harsh way to learn the lesson. But it’s the lesson.
The Strait of Hormuz is 33 kilometres wide. The policies that close or reopen it are made in Washington, Tehran, and Tel Aviv. Nigeria doesn’t sit in any of those rooms. Which means what Nigeria does at home; its production capacity, its refining infrastructure, its fiscal buffers is the only variable it actually controls.