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
As a result, almost all the draw from the SPR is of sour crude (currently ~5 million barrels/week). However, you can't just use up all the reserve because as levels get lower brine must be pumped into the storage chambers to retain pumping pressure, and the more brine that is pumped, the more the output quality declines.
The weekly reports indicate a total in the SPR of about 300mbb, of which ~100 are sweet and 200 sour. But for the reasons above, output becomes unusable one the sour levels fall to ~140-150mbb, at which point there is almost certainly a severe diesel supply shock. At current drawdown rates, that would be sometime around October/November, right in the middle of harvest season when demand for diesel is highest.
There's more complexity to this than I want to type out in a HN comment, but not that much more. Draw your own conclusions.
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