MANY MINDEDGulf bypass pipelines carry less than half of what Hormuz moved
Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has again nearly stopped, DW reports, as Iran attacked tankers and fired drones and missiles at military facilities in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan. The United States has resumed a naval blockade of Iranian ports and revoked the waiver that let Iran sell its oil openly. A preliminary ceasefire signed on June 17 is no longer in force. The war began on February 28.
The volumes carry the story. Before the war the strait was the gateway for about 20% of global LNG and carried around 20% of the world's oil out of the Persian Gulf, averaging roughly 20 million barrels a day, most of it bound for Asia. Flows fell to about 14.6 million barrels a day in the first quarter and have dropped sharply since the escalation. Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain send the majority of their oil exports through it. The bypass routes that exist — Saudi Arabia's East-West Pipeline and the UAE's Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline — can reroute at most 8.8 million barrels a day, according to the IEA, and new pipeline capacity takes years and billions of dollars.
Energy cost sits underneath the price of nearly everything else, so this is a broad setback rather than a regional one. And the escape route has a chokepoint of its own: the East-West line ends at Yanbu on the Red Sea, from which tankers must still pass Bab el-Mandeb, within reach of Yemen's Houthis. Iran's threats now extend to that alternative infrastructure directly.
Watch the UAE, which is expanding east-coast port capacity beyond both chokepoints, and the smaller pipelines operating or under development in Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, and Turkey — modest capacity that cannot cover a major Hormuz disruption.
Source: Google News