Two long-ignored desert pipelines are suddenly doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the global oil system. With shipping through the Strait of Hormuz throttled by the Iran war and more than 1,000 vessels backed up, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are pushing crude through overland routes built to dodge exactly this kind of choke point, reports the Wall Street Journal. Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser calls it "the biggest crisis" the region's energy sector has faced; the state-owned oil company is racing to push its East-West pipeline, which runs 746 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, to its 7-million-barrel-a-day limit within days.
The pipeline was built 45 years ago as the Iran-Iraq War threatened shipping in the Persian Gulf. Though it has never operated at full capacity for a lengthy period, roughly 5 million barrels could reach global buyers daily through the pipeline, close to the volumes Riyadh was shipping through Hormuz before the conflict. A smaller UAE line from Habshan to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman can move up to 1.8 million barrels a day, helping ease pressure, but it was already carrying 1.1 million barrels daily before war erupted. With oil from Kuwait, Iraq, and Bahrain still stuck, the two pipelines could "slow, though not stop, runaway petroleum prices," potentially buying President Trump some time, writes Bloomberg's Javier Blas. But their now-crucial role has made them tempting targets for Iran, analysts warn. (The IEA just agreed to its largest-ever oil release.)
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