Tehran, July 24:
Before the war in Iran, roughly 15 million barrels of Persian Gulf oil were shipped each day through the Strait of Hormuz. Within a few years, much of that oil could bypass the strait.
As Iran’s chokehold over the strait drags on, oil prices surge, so countries across the Gulf are planning to spend billions of dollars to build pipelines enabling them to redirect more supplies to ports along the Red Sea, Suez Canal and Gulf of Oman.
At least seven major pipeline projects are under construction, in the planning stage or being discussed as possibilities, according to government officials, oil companies and analysts.
Even alternatives to Hormuz can become vulnerable, as Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have shown this week with a stated blockade on Saudi-linked vessels attempting to transit the Red Sea. But the war has been a wake-up call for Gulf oil producers, who are determined to become less dependent on a transit point that hugs Iran’s coast.
Some alternative routes will take longer be more expensive. Regardless, relying so heavily on the Strait of Hormuz “is no longer a prudent long-term strategy,” said Victoria Grabenwoger, senior researcher at the data and analysis firm Kpler.
The effective shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz would have been an even greater shock to the world economy were it not for a pipeline Saudi Arabia built in the 1980s amid fears that Tehran would disrupt shipping through the strait during the Iran-Iraq war.
The Saudis’ East-West pipeline carries oil across the desert nation from a processing facility in Abqaiq to the city of Yanbu on the Red Sea coast. Once there, it is loaded onto tankers that head either south to the Arabian Sea or north to the Suez Canal.