Trump Threatens the "Biggest Attack of Them All." An Indian Refiner Is Already on the Phone Looking for Barrels That Don't Pass Through Hormuz.

The 85% Number Everyone Cites Hides Where the Actual Pain Lands First India imports 85-90% of its crude oil - a figure repeated so often it has stopped meaning anything specific to most readers.

What it actually means, when the Strait of Hormuz gets tense again, is that a state-run refiner in Gujarat or a private one in Jamnagar has to reprice its entire procurement plan within days, because roughly 40% of India's historical crude flow has, at various points, transited a waterway that a US-Iran military exchange can make instantly more expensive to use - not blocked outright, just costlier, through freight insurance premiums that spike the moment CENTCOM confirms a strike.

The Mechanism: How a Strike Near Hormuz Becomes a Higher LPG Cylinder Price at Home This is not

abstract. When tanker insurers price in war-risk premiums for Gulf transit, that cost gets built into the landed price of every barrel moving through the strait - and Indian refiners, operating on thin margins, pass a share of that cost forward, eventually surfacing in retail fuel and LPG prices months later, once existing lower-cost inventory works through the system.

The gap between "oil prices spiked in the news" and "your LPG cylinder costs more next quarter" is exactly this lag - real, but delayed enough that most people never connect the two events when the price change actually arrives.

Why India's Strategic Petroleum Reserve Doesn't Solve This India's SPR

• around 5.33 million tonnes of storage capacity, roughly nine to ten days of national consumption - was built for exactly this kind of shock. But it is a buffer against a total supply stoppage, not a hedge against sustained higher prices during a prolonged, intermittent conflict like this one, now running more than six months with pauses and restarts. A reserve designed to smooth a short, sharp disruption cannot substitute for the deeper structural fix India actually needs: genuine diversification of import sources, which is precisely why Indian refiners have simultaneously been chasing discounted Russian crude and, more recently, expanding Venezuelan imports even as both carry their own geopolitical fragility. For the exam, the insight worth holding is that "energy security" is not a single metric - it's the gap between three different numbers that move independently: how much oil India needs, how much transits a chokepoint it doesn't control and how many days its buffer stock can absorb before that gap becomes a genuine shortage rather than just a price shock. Every renewed round of US-Iran hostility tests all three at once and this is the sixth month it has done so, which should worry an aspirant more than any single day's headline.