Gulf oil exporters have kept crude flowing through the fighting between Israel and Iran, but the workarounds they have assembled carry rising costs, according to a report by ABC News.

The region's producers and shippers have so far avoided a full-scale disruption to exports from the Persian Gulf, the corridor that handles roughly a fifth of the world's oil supply. ABC News reports that Gulf nations have found ways to maintain shipments even as missiles crossed the region and insurers repriced the risk of calling at major loading terminals.

The finding matters for anyone watching freight, cargo cover, and crude slates. A closure or sustained impairment of the Strait of Hormuz — the chokepoint through which most Gulf crude and LNG must pass — remains the tail risk in every supply model. What the report describes instead is a slower-burning problem: cargo that still moves, but at a premium.

The mounting costs fall into categories familiar from past regional crises. War-risk insurance premiums for tankers transiting the Gulf have risen, adding per-voyage surcharges that refiners and traders ultimately absorb into delivered crude prices. Routing has shifted where operators judge certain corridors or terminals to carry unacceptable risk, adding steaming days and tanker ton-mile demand. ABC News characterizes the aggregate effect as costs that keep building the longer hostilities persist, even though barrels continue to reach buyers.

Gulf producers have spent the years since previous regional shocks building redundancy into their export systems. The UAE's Fujairah terminal sits outside the Strait of Hormuz, connected to Abu Dhabi's onshore fields by the roughly 1.5-million-b/d Habshan–Fujairah pipeline, giving one producer a partial bypass of the chokepoint. Saudi Arabia operates its East-West pipeline, running about 5 million b/d of capacity across the kingdom to Red Sea terminals at Yanbu. These assets, commissioned after earlier threats to Gulf shipping, are the infrastructure that makes the "keep the oil flowing" outcome possible — and their utilization is effectively the region's insurance policy.

The distinction between flow and cost is the one the market should hold onto. So long as loading continues at Ras Tanura, Jubail, Basrah, and Fujairah, headline export volumes can hold up while the delivered cost of Gulf crude creeps higher through insurance, demurrage, and routing. That dynamic tightens physical differentials without registering as a supply outage.

It also frames the question for OPEC+ and for Asian refiners, who take the bulk of Gulf crude. Producers with spare capacity can lean on it to keep customers supplied, but sustained conflict raises the cost of every barrel moved and complicates decisions on output policy, freight contracting, and term-lift scheduling for the months ahead.

For refiners on the receiving end, the watch items are concrete. Watch war-risk premium quotes for Gulf calls, which move faster than any other indicator of perceived shipping danger. Watch loadings and transit counts at Hormuz and at the out-of-chokepoint terminals at Fujairah and Yanbu, where higher utilization would signal producers routing around the strait. And watch any commentary from Gulf producers' shipping and logistics arms, which will telegraph stress before export statistics do.

The war has not stopped the oil. It has made the oil more expensive to move — and ABC News reports those costs are still climbing.