Besides the Strait of Hormuz, what options do Gulf countries have?

Hormuz has long been considered one of the world’s major trade chokepoints. It typically transports about 20 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products per day, as well as about a fifth of global LNG exports. A third of the world’s helium and a similar amount of urea, which is ultimately used as fertilizer, also pass through the strait.

Diverse plans and projects to escape the Strait of Hormuz have been decades in the making, and these workarounds are now being stress-tested like never before. The bypass infrastructure has generally met the architects’ expectations, providing a crude oil production capacity of approximately 3.5 million barrels per day to 5.5 million barrels per day.

But this is not enough.

Hormuz’s solution

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The most important pipeline on Earth currently runs through Saudi Arabia. The East-West Pipeline, also known as the Petroline, was built during the original Tanker Wars in the 1980s, when Iran and Iraq attacked commercial ships in the Gulf as part of their wider conflict.

The pipeline’s capacity was expanded to an emergency limit of 7 million barrels in 2019. However, loading terminals in the city of Yanbu on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast were never designed to move so much oil so fast, and analysts who track tanker traffic estimate that the amount of oil currently flowing through the pipeline is less than its theoretical limit.

Oil shipped from Yanbu to Europe still has to pass through Egypt via the Sumed Pipeline, which has a capacity of only 2.5 million barrels per day. Although oil flows through the pipeline have surged 150% since the war began, its relatively small capacity remains a constraint on European supplies.

Iran is aware of the geoeconomic importance of oil and is targeting it accordingly. In April, an Iranian drone struck a pumping station, disrupting the flow of 700,000 barrels of oil per day. Operator Saudi Aramco returned production lines to full capacity within three days. While the repair time is reassuring, the fact of the strike is not.

The other half of the Gulf Bypass story runs through the United Arab Emirates. The Abu Dhabi crude oil pipeline runs from Habshan to Fujairah on the country’s Gulf of Oman side. Adcop has a production capacity of nearly 2 million barrels per day and is the only major bypass from the Gulf directly into the Indian Ocean.

But like the Petroline, it was targeted during the war. On March 3, 14 and 16, Iranian drones struck Fujairah, causing tank fires and halting loading. While Adcop offers some diverse services to the UAE, it does not solve the targeting problem.

For other large oil producers in the Gulf, the situation is even worse. Almost all of Iraq’s 3.4 million barrels of crude oil exports per day before the war passed through the southern port city of Basra and the Strait of Hormuz.

There is a pipeline to the north that connects Kirkuk’s oil fields to Ceyhan in Turkey. The pipeline reopened in September 2025 after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, with flows increasing to 250,000 barrels per day in March. But that number pales in comparison to Iraq’s losses.

Things are even worse in Kuwait. Pre-war crude oil exports were approximately 2 million barrels per day, each barrel exported through Hormuz. Kuwait has no pipeline alternative. Kuwait Petroleum Co. declared force majeure in March, temporarily allowing it to suspend its obligations under delivery contracts.

The deadline was extended on April 20, with the oil company saying it would not be able to meet its contractual obligations even if the Hormuz field reopened. It will take months to overcome the damage to Kuwait’s production base and ramp up production.

Qatar’s fragility is another form. Its pre-war crude oil exports were lower than those of its Gulf neighbors, at around 600,000 barrels per day. These exports all leave Qatar through the strait. For Qatar, the most important thing is natural gas. Ras Laffan’s 77 million tonnes of LNG production capacity is the world’s largest, supplying approximately 19% of global LNG trade. There is no alternative but to transport gas through Hormuz.

Iran itself has built the Hormuz Bypass: a 1,000-kilometer pipeline from Goree at the head of the Gulf to the terminal at Jask on the Gulf of Oman. Its design capacity is 1 million barrels per day. But in reality, sanctions and unfinished terminal infrastructure have kept actual throughput at a fraction of what was designed.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that in the summer of 2024, the pipeline will flow less than 70,000 barrels per day. That September, loading stopped completely. According to Kpler, which provides real-time data on global shipping dynamics, only one tanker (about 2 million barrels) has loaded cargo at Jask so far during the war.

Since the war began, there have been understandable calls for more pipelines in the Gulf. But there is no answer. Replicating the Strait of Hormuz in a pipeline would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and a decade of construction. In the end, reaching new pipelines and terminals in Yanbu, Fujairah and elsewhere with drones is no more difficult than reaching old pipelines and terminals. SKS

SKS

This article was generated from automated news agency feeds without modifications to the text.