Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Gulf oil producers are expanding alternative export routes, but no pipeline network can yet replace the strategic capacity of the world’s most important oil chokepoint.
DUBAI — For decades, the world’s energy system has depended on a narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman. The arrangement was efficient, predictable and enormously consequential — but it also created a vulnerability that has become impossible to ignore.
The Strait of Hormuz carried an average of about 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products a day in 2024 and the first half of 2025, equivalent to roughly one-fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption. By the first quarter of 2026, amid the conflict and disruption, flows had fallen to about 14.6 million barrels per day.
The disruption has forced Gulf producers to revive and accelerate an infrastructure strategy conceived decades ago: move as much crude as possible overland, around the chokepoint, and onto tankers at ports beyond Iran’s immediate reach.
But the arithmetic remains unforgiving.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have the most substantial alternatives. Yet even their combined bypass infrastructure represents only a fraction of the volumes that normally move through Hormuz. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that Saudi and Emirati pipelines together could provide about 4.7 million barrels per day of bypass capacity under disruption conditions.
That makes the current crisis about more than rerouting tankers. It is forcing governments, oil companies and importers to reconsider the architecture of the global energy trade.
“Very few alternative options exist to move oil out of the strait if it is closed.” — U.S. Energy Information Administration
Hormuz remains the chokepoint no pipeline can replace
The Strait of Hormuz is narrow geographically but enormous economically.
Located between Iran and Oman, the waterway is the principal maritime gateway for oil exported from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Iran.
Before the current disruption, roughly 20 million barrels per day of petroleum liquids crossed the strait. In the first quarter of 2026, EIA data recorded 14.6 million barrels per day, including 10.7 million barrels of crude and condensate and 3.9 million barrels of petroleum products.
Hormuz is also indispensable to the global LNG market.
About one-fifth of global LNG trade transited the strait in 2024, with Qatar responsible for the overwhelming majority of those Gulf shipments. About 83 percent of LNG moving through Hormuz that year was destined for Asian markets, particularly China, India and South Korea.
That dual dependence — oil and gas — is what makes the waterway so difficult to replace.
A pipeline can move crude around a chokepoint. It cannot reproduce the flexibility and scale of a maritime corridor connecting multiple producers directly with customers across Asia and beyond.
Saudi Arabia turns to the Red Sea
Saudi Arabia has the region’s most important alternative oil-export system: the East-West Pipeline.
The network connects oil-producing and processing facilities in the kingdom’s east with the Red Sea port of Yanbu.
The pipeline was originally developed as a strategic hedge against disruptions in the Gulf, particularly during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Its importance has become much more apparent during the current crisis.
Reuters reported in March that Saudi Arabia had sharply increased flows through the pipeline as shipping through Hormuz became increasingly difficult. Flows from Yanbu reached a record 5.9 million barrels per day on March 9, according to data cited by Reuters, with the system expected to approach its 7-million-barrel-per-day capacity.
Yet pipeline capacity is not the same as effective export capacity.
The crude must still reach terminals, be loaded onto tankers and pass through another strategic corridor before reaching international buyers.
That creates a new set of vulnerabilities.
Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea route ultimately exposes exports to the security environment surrounding the Bab el-Mandeb and Red Sea. The 2019 attack on Saudi pipeline infrastructure demonstrated that overland routes are themselves vulnerable to regional conflict.
The lesson is increasingly clear: bypassing one chokepoint does not eliminate geopolitical risk. It changes where that risk is concentrated.
The UAE has its own escape route
The United Arab Emirates has another major advantage: geography.
The country’s Habshan-Fujairah pipeline system moves crude from Abu Dhabi’s oil fields to Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman, allowing exports to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.
The system has become one of the most strategically valuable pieces of infrastructure in the Gulf.
The EIA estimates that Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline and the UAE’s Abu Dhabi pipeline together provide about 4.7 million barrels per day of potential bypass capacity.
But Fujairah itself has become a critical node, meaning that pipeline capacity must be considered alongside storage, loading facilities and tanker availability.
A pipeline capable of moving a million additional barrels per day is of limited value if the receiving terminal cannot load those barrels at the same rate.
Iraq faces a much harder problem
Iraq is among the Gulf’s most exposed producers.
Much of its oil exports originate in the south and normally travel through Hormuz. When the waterway becomes inaccessible, crude storage rapidly becomes a constraint.
The country’s northern export infrastructure offers an alternative route through Turkey toward the Mediterranean, but its capacity and reliability are far below what would be required to replace Iraq’s southern export system.
Long-discussed plans to expand connections between southern Iraqi oil fields and Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan have therefore acquired renewed strategic importance.
Other proposals, including an Iraq-Jordan pipeline terminating at Aqaba, have also been discussed as ways of diversifying Iraq’s export geography.
But these projects face substantial technical, financial, political and security obstacles.
They cannot solve the immediate problem.
The infrastructure race is about more than pipelines
The current crisis is encouraging Gulf governments to treat export diversification as a strategic priority rather than a contingency plan.
The objective is not necessarily to eliminate Hormuz dependence completely. That would be extraordinarily expensive and, in the near term, unrealistic.
Instead, producers are seeking to ensure that a larger share of their output can continue reaching international markets if the strait becomes inaccessible.
The distinction is important.
A country that can divert 10 percent of its exports is vulnerable.
A country that can divert 40 or 50 percent has considerably more strategic flexibility.
And a country that can move oil through multiple independent routes — pipelines, ports and maritime corridors — has still greater resilience.
The capacity gap remains enormous
The fundamental problem is the scale of Hormuz.
Even if Saudi Arabia and the UAE were able to use their bypass systems at maximum effective capacity, their combined alternative capacity would cover only a portion of normal Hormuz flows.
EIA estimates that the two countries’ pipelines together could provide approximately 4.7 million barrels per day of bypass capacity. Against the roughly 20 million barrels per day that passed through Hormuz during much of 2024 and 2025, that leaves a substantial gap.
The gap becomes even more consequential when considering the full Gulf export system.
Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain have considerably fewer options for bypassing the strait. Qatar’s LNG exports are particularly exposed because the country’s major LNG facilities depend on maritime access through Hormuz.
There is no equivalent pipeline that can simply replace that trade.
LNG presents the harder problem
Oil can sometimes be diverted through pipelines.
LNG is different.
Qatar exported about 9.3 billion cubic feet per day of LNG through Hormuz in 2024, while the UAE exported another 0.7 billion cubic feet per day. Together, those flows accounted for nearly all Persian Gulf LNG exports through the waterway.
The current disruption has demonstrated how difficult it is to replace those volumes.
EIA reported that the closure affected more than 10 billion cubic feet per day of global LNG supplies, or approximately 20 percent of the world’s LNG trade.
Unlike crude, LNG requires specialized liquefaction, shipping, storage and regasification infrastructure. A producer cannot simply redirect gas through an existing oil pipeline.
That makes the LNG vulnerability one of the most difficult elements of the Hormuz crisis to solve.
The Red Sea is not a perfect alternative
The geography of Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline offers an important escape from Hormuz, but it does not provide an escape from geopolitics.
Crude reaching Yanbu must be shipped through the Red Sea toward the Bab el-Mandeb before reaching the wider Indian Ocean.
That waterway has itself become a major security concern.
The result is a chain of interconnected chokepoints:
Hormuz → Gulf of Oman → Arabian Sea → Bab el-Mandeb → Red Sea → Suez Canal
A disruption at any one of those points can increase shipping costs and force tankers onto longer routes.
The Cape of Good Hope provides another option, but at a substantial cost in voyage distance and time.
The Asian buyer problem
The geography of global oil demand creates another complication.
Most of the Gulf’s largest customers are in Asia.
China, India, Japan and South Korea are therefore positioned at the end of the supply chain rather than along the alternative western routes now being developed.
Redirecting Gulf oil toward the Mediterranean can create a geographic mismatch: crude that reaches ports such as Ceyhan still has to travel a long distance to reach Asian refineries.
For refiners operating with narrow margins, transportation costs can materially change the economics of crude procurement.
The disruption therefore has implications beyond the physical availability of oil.
It can alter which grades are economical, which refineries remain competitive and which shipping routes become commercially viable.
A new energy architecture is emerging
The immediate crisis may eventually subside. The strategic consequences are likely to last much longer.
The experience of 2026 has demonstrated that Gulf producers cannot assume that Hormuz will always function as an unrestricted commercial waterway.
That realization could accelerate investment in:
- additional pipeline capacity;
- larger crude-storage facilities;
- alternative export terminals;
- Red Sea and Gulf of Oman infrastructure;
- strategic petroleum reserves;
- tanker diversification;
- and alternative LNG supply arrangements.
The objective is not to build a second Hormuz.
No single alternative is capable of doing that.
Instead, Gulf producers are gradually constructing a network of partial substitutes.
Each route reduces exposure by a limited amount. Collectively, they could make a future disruption less economically devastating.
Three possible futures
Scenario 1: Hormuz gradually returns to normal
If maritime traffic fully resumes and production returns to pre-conflict levels, Gulf exporters are likely to continue using alternative routes anyway.
The crisis has demonstrated their strategic value.
Investment already committed to pipelines and terminals will therefore remain part of the region’s long-term energy strategy.
Scenario 2: Partial bypass becomes the new normal
Under a more fragmented regional security environment, Gulf producers could maintain significantly larger volumes through Yanbu and Fujairah while continuing to use Hormuz for the remainder.
This would create a more diversified but more expensive export system.
Insurance premiums, tanker availability and route-specific security risks could remain structurally higher.
Scenario 3: Multiple chokepoints become contested
The most dangerous scenario would involve simultaneous disruption across Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb and other major maritime routes.
In that environment, bypass pipelines would provide only partial protection.
Oil could still move, but at considerably higher transportation and insurance costs.
The global market would become more dependent on longer routes around Africa and on production from regions outside the Gulf.
The crisis has changed the calculation
The central lesson of the Hormuz disruption is not that the Gulf can simply bypass the strait.
It cannot — at least not at anything close to the scale required today.
The lesson is that the region can reduce its dependence.
Saudi Arabia has demonstrated the value of its Red Sea pipeline. The UAE has shown the strategic importance of Fujairah. Iraq is again considering alternative northern and western corridors. And importers are reassessing their dependence on a concentrated group of Gulf suppliers.
Yet the underlying arithmetic remains stark.
The Strait of Hormuz handled approximately 20 million barrels per day of oil flows through much of 2024 and 2025. Even after the infrastructure expansion now underway, no alternative network can replicate that capacity quickly.
And oil is only part of the problem.
Qatar’s LNG exports remain particularly dependent on maritime access through Hormuz, leaving a vulnerability that pipelines cannot solve.
The Gulf is therefore entering a new phase of energy planning — one in which efficiency is being balanced against resilience.
For decades, the cheapest route was also the obvious route.
The events of 2026 have demonstrated the cost of that assumption.
The next generation of Gulf energy infrastructure will be designed around a different principle: never allow a single chokepoint to become the only route to market.
