Turkish Straits Throughput Climbs to 4.1 Million Barrels a Day Even as Novorossiysk Terminal Goes Dark
A jump in Bosphorus oil transit coexists with the July 2026 outage of a key Russian crude terminal, raising questions about what shifted in the cargo mix.
The Turkish Straits, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles together, moved 4.1 million barrels a day in the second quarter of 2026, up from 3.7 million in the first half of 2025, according to data cited in an oilprice.com analysis from Saturday (2026-08-22). The increase came while the Sheskharis terminal at Novorossiysk — which had been moving about 650,000 barrels a day, roughly a fifth of Russia's seaborne crude — sat idle from July 21 (2026).4
The two numbers do not reconcile neatly. A terminal responsible for 650,000 barrels a day going dark in mid-July should weigh on Bosphorus southbound flows, yet the quarterly throughput figure printed higher. Something shifted in the cargo mix, whether in Black Sea routing patterns or in the source of crude moving south through the strait. The oilprice.com analysis flagged cargo mix as a material factor but did not specify what changed.4
ICE Brent crude front-month was at $92.47 per barrel on Monday (2026-08-24) at 01:48 UTC, down 0.80%. Crude markets have been weighing a reported 392% jump in Strait of Hormuz ship traffic over 14 days, per data published on Saturday (2026-08-22). Hormuz disruption typically redirects trader attention toward alternative export corridors; the Bosphorus is one of the limited routes that can carry Black Sea and Russian crude heading south toward Asian buyers.5
Physical limits constrain the Bosphorus channel regardless of what flows through it. More than 40,000 ships transited last year, threading a waterway that narrows to 750 meters with a city of 16 million on both banks. Throughput can shift with upstream terminal status, but the channel itself has no spare capacity to offer.4
Under the Montreux Convention of 1936, the Turkish Straits are governed by a treaty that deliberately limits Ankara's ability to restrict civilian passage, even though the channel falls entirely within Turkey's territorial waters. That distinguishes the Bosphorus from the Strait of Hormuz, which operates under no equivalent agreement and where transit has been disrupted during U.S. operations against Iran in 2026. Turkey charges fees on passages but has limited authority to stop or redirect them.1,2
Turkey's stated answer has been Canal Istanbul, a proposed $25 billion parallel waterway outside Montreux that would give Ankara discretion over fees and transit rights the convention does not permit. A decade of discussion has not produced a construction start date. For now, a single terminal outage upstream can move Bosphorus throughput data in ways Turkey has no mechanism to prevent.4
Turkey's wider transit footprint has expanded through other routes. The Iraq-Turkey pipeline from Kirkuk to the Ceyhan terminal on the Mediterranean resumed in late 2025 after a two-and-a-half-year halt triggered by an International Chamber of Commerce ruling ordering Ankara to pay Baghdad $1.5 billion in damages. A deal between BOTAS, Iraq's SOMO and the North Oil Company put flows back online; tanker Valpiave loaded over 600,000 barrels at Ceyhan on August 3 (2026), according to industry data. Ceyhan feeds the Mediterranean, not the Bosphorus, so the Kirkuk pipeline does not appear in Strait transit counts.3
The Sheskharis terminal's restart is the immediate variable for Bosphorus volume watchers. No timeline was cited in the Saturday (2026-08-22) analysis. If Novorossiysk output stays offline through the third quarter of 2026, the 400,000-barrel-per-day gain registered between the first half of 2025 and the second quarter is likely to narrow when the next throughput figure is published.4