Simulation of Hormuz Strait closure reveals cascading global oil crisis

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OP here: I created this visualization tool as the byproduct of a supply chain class I taught at Columbia. The pedagogical exercise grew into a full blown visualization and paper about global oil trade. The model:

The mechanics are the same as the financial network Eisenberg-Noe: Instead of banks, every country consumes oil interconnected via bilateral trading. Shocks propagate throughout the network, depleting oil reserves when bottleneck nodes (such as the Strait of Hormuz) are blocked. Insights:

The interesting part is the mechanics of how the crisis unfolds: for example, France receives 0 oil from Hormuz directly, yet their reserves are depleted faster because other countries reactively increase their safety oil stock, increasing oil price, making stockouts more expensive for everyone. The model also gives price dynamics which are interesting on their own: the price increase is not immediate, it follows sequentially as countries reserves deplete. Some caveats:

1. For producer nodes, depletion means their export slack is reduced/exhausted.

2. No sanctioned trade (UN Comtrade data) Technical Details:

The visualization is 600 lines of flask plus js frontend (LLM assisted visualization with ground-truth matching the original numerical exercise of the paper) Paper with proofs/theory:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17491

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020545

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