US Energy Secretary Chris Wright Talks Oil Flows Through Strait of Hormuz

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
US. Energy Secretary Chris Wright speaking with Bloomberg Television anchor Anne-Marie Horden at the Bloomberg Energy Security Executive Briefing. Let's take a listen right now.

**Chris Wright** (0:17)
Blowing off nuclear bombs right now, let's just forget about it and move on. But he wasn't willing to do that. He said, we have to solve that problem. I'm not going to hand my successor a nuclear-armed Iran. And so there's dialogue back, of course, you know, they for 47 years, they are wedded to becoming nuclear-armed and for whatever crazy reason to export their Islamic revolution and change the whole world.
Everyone converted or dead. It's an ideology that doesn't work well with other nations, with other people, and of course, disastrous for the 90 million Iranians that live under that regime. So that's sort of the broader backdrop.

**Anne-Marie Horden** (1:02)
I guess it's just hard to understand if, is this a real inflection point, only because the president has said about 40 times since this conflict started, that we were close to a peace deal and then a peace deal never happened.

**Chris Wright** (1:15)
Iran says things that they'll agree to things that work for us and then they don't. Of course, look, the regime is fragmented, there's different power sources there, so it's a complex situation and he's a negotiator too, right? So you've got to understand the communications share information, they also share messaging. But the one piece of leverage, the only piece of meaningful leverage Iran has had has been to interrupt the flows of energy flowing out of the Persian Gulf. We had 20 million barrels a day, round numbers flowing out before the conflict started through the East-West Pipeline and the UAE Pipeline.
Close to 5 million barrels of that has been diverted. We've got increased production.
It was pretty easy to do a few other places. I think in round numbers, you had maybe a 14 million barrel a day flow gap, which is a big flow gap of oil going out of the Gulf at the start of this conflict, early on in this conflict. We have a military effort that we've not talked a lot about, that started more recently, to get cargos out. You know, because we, President Trump said at the beginning, they're not going to have a nuclear weapon, and we'll restore energy flows in the United States with or without Iran. He always prefers the diplomatic arm, and he works tirelessly on that. But we also have the, we have the most powerful military in the world. We've destroyed most, but not all of their military capabilities, and we're just going to restore flows ourself. And flows today are close, approaching half of the gap, and they're rising. Ultimately, we will restore flows with or without them.

**Anne-Marie Horden** (2:57)
So, 7 million barrels a day are getting out right now?

**Chris Wright** (3:01)
That's a rough estimate, a rough average of where we are right now, and it's rising.

**Anne-Marie Horden** (3:05)
So, what kind, is this oil, is it products, fertilizer?

**Chris Wright** (3:10)
Mix of the two.

**Anne-Marie Horden** (3:11)
And it's being done with the US military?

**Chris Wright** (3:14)
Correct.

**Anne-Marie Horden** (3:15)
So, are ships turning off their transponders, or is the military escorting them? Is it by air? Is it by sea?

**Chris Wright** (3:26)
Most of them, it's hard to transport crude by air.

**Anne-Marie Horden** (3:32)
I mean protective.

**Chris Wright** (3:34)
But yes, the military protection is there.
It's actually going remarkably well. And of course, this is just the US innovation, US military power solving a problem.
And we'll continue to solve that problem. So think of that impact that has on the dynamics. If I'm in Iran, and of course, they're not concerned about Iranian people, right? They're concerned about their regime and their selves personally. So they have a little bit of a narrower focus on what they care about. But they've thought they have this great leverage over the United States of America. Of course, it isn't really leverage over us. It's leverage over the world economy. But they're losing that leverage right now. They are rapidly and will continue to lose that leverage. So you would think that their urgency to do a deal is rising. And it is rising. They realize the jig is going to be up before too long. What can they get?

**Anne-Marie Horden** (4:31)
How much Iranian crude is getting out right now?

**Chris Wright** (4:34)
Zero.

**Anne-Marie Horden** (4:35)
No Iranian crude is able to escape. So if this deal were to happen, would the United States let Iranian crude go through the Strait of Hormuz?