1. What Kharg Island is, in one paragraph
Kharg Island is a small Iranian island in the northern Persian Gulf, about 25 kilometers off Iran's coast, that ships somewhere between 90% and 96% of Iran's crude oil exports, depending on the source and the year measured, making it by far the country's most important oil export terminal. Kpler put the share at 94% for the twelve months to 16 March 2026, Argus Media described it as “around 92%” for 2023 to 2025 against 70% to 75% before the 2018 US sanctions, and other outlets cited figures as low as 90% and as high as 96% for other periods (Kpler, 16 March 2026; Argus Media, 16 March 2026). This page covers the terminal's capacity, how a Kharg outage differs from a closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and how Iran's actual export volumes moved through 2026, including what is and is not confirmed about explosion reports from September 2026.
Kharg sits well north of the strait itself; any tanker loading there still has to sail about 480 kilometers through the Gulf before reaching that chokepoint (Kpler, 16 March 2026).
2. Terminal capacity and why the island matters so much
Kharg Island's importance rests on physical storage and loading infrastructure built to move crude from Iran's onshore fields to tankers waiting offshore, and the capacity estimates vary by source and date rather than resting on one official figure. Kpler put crude storage capacity at about 31 million barrels, with stocks at roughly 18 million barrels, or 58% full, on 7 March 2026 (Kpler, 16 March 2026). Argus Media instead gave 32 to 34 million barrels of crude storage plus 5 to 7 million barrels for refined products, as of the end of 2025 (Argus Media, 16 March 2026). Both describe the same island at different moments using different definitions, so this page lists them side by side rather than averaging them.
Iran's alternative export terminal, Jask, was built specifically to sit outside the Strait of Hormuz, a design choice that underlines how Kharg itself lies inside the Gulf and depends on that strait to reach open water (Argus Media, 16 March 2026). Because roughly 90% to 96% of Iran's crude still leaves through Kharg rather than Jask, analysts describe the island as Iran's oil economy backbone and its greatest single point of vulnerability at the same time (Kpler, 16 March 2026).
3. How Iran's oil exports actually moved in 2026
Iran's oil exports collapsed through 2026, and the timing lines up with a renewed US naval blockade, not with any confirmed damage to the Kharg terminal itself. Exports ran at roughly 1.85 million barrels a day in early 2026, before falling to 1.57 million b/d in February and 1.47 million b/d in March (Crypto Briefing, 11 September 2026; Kpler via Argus Media, 16 March 2026). After the US Navy resumed its blockade on 14 July 2026, exports averaged only about 740,000 barrels a day in July, then fell further to a range of 220,000 to 260,000 barrels a day in August 2026, a drop of roughly 74% to 80% from pre-war levels (Crypto Briefing, 11 September 2026; Bloomberg via briefs.co, 11 September 2026). Iran's trade already sat in the shadow of Western sanctions before this blockade, a separate mechanism our sanctions shadow glossary entry covers.
| Period | Iran crude exports | As of / source |
|---|---|---|
| Early 2026, pre-blockade | about 1.85 million b/d | Crypto Briefing, 11 September 2026 |
| February 2026 | 1.57 million b/d | Kpler via Argus Media, 16 March 2026 |
| March 2026 | 1.47 million b/d | Kpler via Argus Media, 16 March 2026 |
| July 2026, after blockade resumed 14 Jul 2026 | about 740,000 b/d average | Crypto Briefing, 11 September 2026 |
| August 2026 | 220,000 to 260,000 b/d (about 247,000 b/d in one estimate) | Bloomberg via briefs.co; Crypto Briefing, both 11 September 2026 |
Satellite imagery shows the last documented tanker loading at Kharg's eastern pier on 25 August 2026, with only minimal activity visible since (briefs.co, citing Bloomberg, Kpler, Vortexa and EU Sentinel satellite data, 11 September 2026). China remained the main buyer, with Kpler-tracked purchases that had swung between about 1.1 and 1.7 million b/d before the blockade cut volumes sharply (Argus Media, 16 March 2026).
4. Why a Kharg outage is not the same shock as a Hormuz closure
A Kharg outage and a closure of the Strait of Hormuz are different kinds of shock: Kharg removes Iran's own barrels from the market, while Hormuz is the transit route for everyone's oil and gas passing through the Gulf, a volume many times larger. That chokepoint's own throughput is covered in detail on our Strait of Hormuz glossary entry, linked above. Kharg lies about 480 kilometers north of it, inside the Gulf, so a full stop at the island mainly reduces the roughly 1.5 to 1.85 million b/d Iran had been exporting before the war, a figure that, as shown above, has already fallen close to that range through the blockade rather than through any confirmed strike on the terminal.
Two separate sets of events get reported around Kharg and should not be merged. The United States has confirmed hitting Iranian tankers at sea on 5 September 2026, three vessels, two damaged and one destroyed, in retaliation for Iranian missile strikes on US warships (Washington Post, 5 September 2026), and again on 9 September 2026, five more tankers near Kharg Island, followed by an Iranian missile response against a US base in Jordan (globalsecurity.org, 9 September 2026). Both incidents hit ships at sea, not the fixed terminal infrastructure on the island itself. Separately, Iran's semi-official Mehr News agency reported explosions "at several points" on Kharg Island and in Jask on 8 and 9 September 2026; SBS News covered that same claim as unconfirmed, stating there was "no official confirmation yet on the cause or scale of the explosions" and no reports of casualties or damage. No independent second source has confirmed either the cause or the extent of those explosion reports as of 17 September 2026, and it remains unclear whether they describe an event separate from the tanker strikes or a garbled repeat of them.
For the other chokepoints and bypass routes active in the same conflict, see our Bab el-Mandeb glossary entry. A related bypass on the Saudi side, also facing unattributed attack claims, is covered in our East-West Pipeline glossary entry.
5. What this could mean for your heating oil or diesel bill this winter
Whether Iran's exports stay near their August 2026 low of 220,000 to 260,000 barrels a day, fall further, or partly recover, matters for winter fuel prices mainly through how much spare global supply is left to absorb the swing, not through any single number on this page. Iran's own barrels are a smaller share of world crude demand than the volumes at stake at the Strait of Hormuz, but every barrel that stays off the market adds to the same tight balance that OPEC and its allies, and the strategic petroleum reserves held by importing countries, are meant to cushion.
This page does not predict whether Kharg's shipments will resume, and it makes no promise about the price of heating oil or diesel this winter. What the sources support is narrower: exports have already fallen to a fraction of last year's level for reasons tied to the naval blockade rather than to a confirmed strike on the island, so both a further squeeze and a resumption remain live possibilities rather than settled outcomes. For how a change in crude supply typically works through to a US household bill, see our diesel and heating oil prices page, and to put a number on your own consumption, use our calculator.
See what a change in fuel costs would mean for your own winter budget.
Run the calculator6. What the Kharg Island story does not mean
Kharg Island's export share is best treated as a range, not a single number: sources here give 90%, "around 92%", 94% and 96% for different periods, and none should be quoted alone as "the" figure. The most common mix-up in coverage of this story is confusing the confirmed US strikes on Iranian tankers at sea with the unconfirmed Iranian state-media reports of explosions on the island itself. The tanker strikes of 5 and 9 September 2026 are reported independently by multiple outlets; the explosion reports of 8 to 11 September 2026 rest only on Iranian state and semi-official media, and SBS News explicitly flagged the lack of official confirmation.
It is also a misconception that the sharp August 2026 export drop proves the terminal was destroyed. The documented cause, per the sources gathered here, is the US naval blockade that resumed on 14 July 2026, combined with minimal satellite-observed loading activity since 25 August 2026, not a confirmed physical strike on Kharg's storage or loading infrastructure. How quickly volumes could move again if the blockade eased also depends on Iran's own spare production capacity and export routing choices, not chokepoint risk alone.