We have the alternatives. The crisis proved it

Six weeks into the Strait of Hormuz closure, with a provisional ceasefire agreed on 8 April and the strait still effectively shut on 9 April, one fact sits largely undiscussed beneath the diplomatic noise. Every technology needed to make this crisis irrelevant already exists, at commercial scale, right now.

Not in a white paper. Not scheduled for 2035. Now.

Electric vehicles outsell their petrol equivalents in several European markets. Biodiesel cuts emissions by up to 74% (The Energy Co-op). Bioplastics — PLA from corn, PHA from microbial fermentation — replicate polyethene’s function without a drop of naphtha (Vertec BioSolvents). Green ammonia, produced via water electrolysis on zero-carbon electricity, can replace the fossil feedstocks that currently make fertiliser structurally dependent on Middle East gas (World Resources Institute). Synthetic fuels are manufactured from air and water at a commercial scale today (Zero). Ethanol can replace the fossil feedstock used to produce ethylene — the building block of most plastics on the planet (World Resources Institute).

Every single alternative exists. All of them. The question the Hormuz crisis should be forcing — and isn’t — is why we’re still organising the global economy around a 21-mile channel between Iran and Oman.

The answer is not geography. It’s policy. And the cost of that policy is now measurable in real time.

Approximately 11 million barrels per day of crude production have been taken offline since 28 February. Gulf export volumes have collapsed from roughly 15 million to 7 million barrels per day. Front-month Brent sits near $125 (Kpler). Urea prices are up 50% since the conflict began, with LNG disruptions now threatening US corn planting volumes—a shock that could feed through to food prices into 2027 (WEF). Helium distributors are rationing deliveries. Iran’s advisers have now threatened to extend the disruption to Bab al-Mandeb — which, combined with Hormuz, would block roughly a quarter of the world’s energy supply (Al Jazeera).

And here’s what the ceasefire actually resolved: nothing structural. Iran cannot locate its own mines (NYT via The Researchers). Some devices have drifted; the documentation was never systematic. The US Navy began clearance operations on 11 April. Meanwhile, roughly 400 loaded tankers are waiting to exit the Persian Gulf, while only around 100 empty vessels are willing to enter — because operators and their insurers will not risk getting stranded amid a fragile truce (CNN). Even a clean reopening won’t normalise oil flows until July (CNN). A ceasefire is not an energy strategy.

So why aren’t the alternatives at scale? The short answer is that they have been actively prevented from getting there.

The fossil fuel industry spent over $150 million lobbying the US federal government in 2024 alone (Center for American Progress). InfluenceMap identified more than 50 instances of oil and gas industry groups actively lobbying against green technology adoption across five decades (InfluenceMap). In July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act stripped clean energy tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act while leaving fossil fuel support intact (Akin). The US Energy Secretary publicly acknowledged that clean alternatives would “fly like eagles” on price alone (Ember) — in the same administration that clipped their wings. As one peer-reviewed study noted, oil and gas companies tend to favour technologies that do not fully replace their infrastructure, expertise, or staff (ScienceDirect). Which is a polite way of saying they would rather the future looked exactly like the past.

The infrastructure argument is real. The US alone has nearly 150,000 petrol stations (DieselNet), a century-old refinery network, and pipeline capacity oriented entirely toward oil. Transition at speed is genuinely complex. But “transition is hard” and “transition was actively obstructed for fifty years” are different statements, and conflating them has served exactly one set of interests.

What the Hormuz crisis makes legible — if you’re willing to look — is that energy security and energy transition are not competing priorities. They are the same priority. The IEA called this the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market (IEA Oil Market Report, March 2026). Larger than 1973. Larger than the Iranian Revolution. And it was entirely predictable.

Jet fuel is genuinely difficult to replace, and some industrial feedstocks remain legitimately complex. But petrol for cars? Diesel for vans? LPG for cooking? Plastic packaging? Fertiliser? The alternatives exist for all of these in this quarter, not in a future-scenario document.

An oil crisis is a design choice. We chose this dependency, and we keep choosing it. The Strait of Hormuz did not make itself the world’s most dangerous chokepoint. Fifty years of obstructed transition did.

The data to hold companies accountable for that choice already exists. illuminem’s Sustainability Data Hub tracks 300+ sustainability KPIs — from emissions and renewable electricity to sustainability maturity scores — across more than 9,000 companies globally. The picture it produces is not a comfortable one for an industry that has spent decades arguing that transition is too difficult. If you want to see where your own organisation sits on that curve, the illuminem Benchmark will tell you.

The door is open. The alternatives are there. The question is whether this crisis — the largest in the history of the oil market — is finally the one that makes someone walk through it.

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