Two months into the Iran war, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively choked. Vessel traffic has plunged to a fraction of pre-war volumes as intermittent ceasefires, temporary reopenings and renewed closures have failed to restore tanker confidence.
Hormuz is a linchpin of the global energy system. Under normal conditions it carries roughly 20 million barrels per day of crude and oil products, about one-fifth of global LNG exports, and large shares of the world’s helium and urea for fertilizer. Decades of planning to reduce reliance on the strait are now being tested, but bypasses so far are only a partial solution: current alternative routes deliver roughly 3.5–5.5 million barrels per day of crude capacity, well short of Hormuz’s usual flow.
Major workarounds
Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline (Petroline) is the single most important alternative. Built in the 1980s and expanded to a theoretical emergency capacity of 7 million barrels per day in 2019, it moves oil to Yanbu on the Red Sea. In practice, Yanbu’s loading infrastructure and other chokepoints keep actual flows below that ceiling. Oil routed toward Europe must also pass through Egypt on the Sumed pipeline, which can handle only about 2.5 million barrels per day. Sumed flows have surged—about a 150 percent jump since the conflict began—but its limited capacity caps how much Europe can receive.
The Petroline’s strategic value has made it a target. An Iranian drone strike in April knocked 700,000 barrels per day offline; Saudi Aramco restored capacity within days, a sign that repairs can be swift, but the attack highlighted the vulnerability of overland export routes.
The United Arab Emirates’ Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline (Adcop) links Habshan to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman and is the only major route that bypasses the Gulf entirely into the Indian Ocean, with capacity just under 2 million barrels per day. Adcop also suffered attacks: drone strikes on Fujairah in March set storage tanks ablaze and paused loadings. That route provides important diversification for the UAE, but it remains exposed to similar risks.
Other Gulf producers face steeper constraints. Iraq’s pre-war exports of about 3.4 million barrels per day left almost entirely through Basra and Hormuz. A northern export line from Kirkuk to Ceyhan in Turkey was restarted in September 2025 after a long halt, and by March it was carrying about 250,000 barrels per day—only a small portion of Iraq’s lost volumes.
Kuwait is particularly exposed. Its roughly 2 million barrels per day of pre-war exports all transited Hormuz, and the country has no pipeline alternative. Kuwait declared force majeure in March and extended it in April, warning it could not meet contractual obligations even if the strait reopened. Restoring production and exports will take months.
Qatar’s crude exports were modest (about 0.6 million barrels per day) but its real vulnerability is gas: Ras Laffan’s LNG terminals have around 77 million tonnes of capacity and account for nearly 19 percent of global LNG trade. There is no practical alternative to shipping that gas through Hormuz.
Iran has built its own bypass—a roughly 1,000-kilometer pipeline from Goreh to Jask on the Gulf of Oman intended for about 1 million barrels per day—but sanctions, unfinished terminal facilities and other constraints have kept flows minimal. U.S. data showed under 70,000 barrels per day in summer 2024 and loadings stopped later that year; private trackers report only a single tanker, roughly two million barrels, has loaded at Jask during the war so far.
Why pipelines aren’t an easy fix
Calls to build more pipelines are understandable, but creating an equivalent to Hormuz on land is neither quick nor cheap. Replicating the strait’s capacity with pipelines and terminals would require hundreds of billions of dollars and likely take a decade or more. Even new pipelines and ports would face the same exposure to drone attacks, missile strikes and other disruptions as the facilities they aim to replace.
Bottom line: existing bypasses reduce some pressure on Hormuz but do not come close to replacing it. Short-term workarounds can move meaningful volumes and provide temporary relief, but the strait remains the world’s principal energy artery, and fully mitigating that dependency would demand enormous investment, time and security measures.
