The bet was never that engineers couldn’t close the gap. It was that they would never need to. That assumption is now being stress-tested in a most consequential way—and it is failing.

The Logic Behind the Underinvestment

The record suggests the decision to build partial rather than full bypass capacity was not an oversight. It reflected a consistent reading of geopolitical risk: that Hormuz closures would be measured in days or, at worst, weeks and that global oil markets could absorb short-term disruptions through inventory drawdowns. More likely still, the cost of building infrastructure at scale capable of fully replacing the strait’s throughput was economically indefensible against a threat that might never materialize at full scale.

Saudi Arabia’s East–West Crude Oil Pipeline—Petroline—was constructed in 1981 during the Iran-Iraq War, after Riyadh first confronted the vulnerability of routing the bulk of its exports through Hormuz.

The 1,200-kilometer, dual-pipe system connects the Abqaiq oil processing complex in the Eastern Province to the Red Sea export terminal at Yanbu, running 48-inch and 56-inch lines across the Arabian Peninsula, It was built to provide breathing room, not carry Saudi Arabia’s full export load.

The pipeline’s original 5 million barrels per day capacity has been expanded in subsequent decades. In 2019, following Houthi drone strikes on Aramco’s Abqaiq facility, the company converted parallel natural gas liquids lines to carry crude oil, raising emergency capacity to 7 million barrels per day—a figure never tested at sustained flows until now.

On March 10, Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser announced the company was ramping Petroline to full capacity, telling investors it would hit that mark “in the next couple of days.” The conversion was completed on March 11, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights.

Tanker tracking firm Kpler found Yanbu averaged 2.2 million barrels per day in the first nine days of March—more than double its pre-war rate—while Windward Maritime AI reported a 330% surge from pre-war levels.

The terminal constraint at Yanbu illustrates the planning logic. While Petroline’s pipe can now move 7 million barrels per day, the port’s two terminals—Yanbu North and Yanbu South—have a nominal combined loading capacity of about 4.5 million barrels per day, according to Argus Media. Market sources put the effective, operationally tested figure closer to 4 million barrels per day.

Energy consultancy Vortexa estimated terminals could handle roughly 3 million barrels per day under current wartime conditions.

Aramco typically ships around 2 million barrels per day of crude to its own Red Sea refineries before export crude can leave Yanbu, which further limits headroom. Nobody expanded Yanbu’s loading infrastructure to match Petroline’s pipe capacity because the planning assumption never required them to: the pipe was the hedge, but the port was sized for normal operations.

The UAE made the same calculation, but on a smaller scale. The Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline (ADCOP)—or the Habshan–Fujairah pipeline—runs approximately 380 kilometers from Abu Dhabi’s inland Habshan oil fields to the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, entirely outside the Strait of Hormuz. Designed by WorleyParsons and built by China Petroleum Engineering and Construction Corporation at a final cost of $4.2 billion—more than $900 million over its original estimate—the pipeline became operational in June 2012, according to Global Energy Monitor. All of these upgrades happened before the use of flying drones revolutionized warfare.

Its nameplate capacity of 1.5 million barrels per day represents roughly 60% of the UAE’s normal export volume, suggesting the other 40% was always assumed to move through Hormuz. Kpler senior oil analyst Naveen Das told CNBC on March 12 that ADCOP was operating at 71 percent capacity, leaving approximately 440,000 barrels per day of spare volume—headroom that reflects not strategic reserve but the limits of what Fujairah’s port infrastructure can absorb.

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Iran Leverages Infrastructure Logic

What is striking about Iran’s targeting strategy is how precisely it maps onto the Gulf’s bypass infrastructure. Iran has not simply closed Hormuz and waited. It moved immediately against the exit ramps—the ports and terminals that the bypass pipelines depend on to get oil onto tankers and into global markets. 

On March 1, two drones struck Duqm port on Oman’s southeastern coast, injuring a foreign worker. Two days later, on March 3, drones struck a fuel storage tank at Duqm directly, and debris from a separately intercepted drone caused a fire at Fujairah’s oil terminal, damaging a JSW Infrastructure storage tank with a capacity of nearly 3 million barrels.

On March 6, shipping giant Maersk suspended all operations at the port until further notice.

On March 10, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) shut its Ruwais refinery—one of the world’s largest, located on the Persian Gulf coast of Abu Dhabi emirate—after a drone strike ignited a fire at the facility.

The following day, several Shahed-136 drones struck fuel tanks at the port of Salalah in southern Oman, a deepwater hub on the Arabian Sea roughly 1,000 kilometers from the strait that had been positioned as a Hormuz workaround, according to multiple media outlets.

The London insurance market’s Joint War Committee added waters around Oman to its list of high-risk maritime areas, raising charter and insurance costs for every vessel attempting to use an alternative southern route.

The pattern suggests a strategic insight on Iran’s part that the infrastructure planners did not appear to fully account for: a partial bypass system is only as resilient as its most exposed terminal.

“Iran’s rapid and extensive retaliation against shipping and regional energy, port and economic infrastructure has severed a vital artery in global supply chains,” Torbjorn Soltvedt, principal Middle East analyst at Verisk Maplecroft, wrote in a March 11 note to clients.

One Size Does Not Fit All

The pipeline systems also expose a structural limitation in how bypass infrastructure was conceived: it was designed around crude oil, not the full slate of hydrocarbons that move through Hormuz. Refined products—diesel, jet fuel, naphtha, liquefied petroleum gases—require separate infrastructure or maritime transport that no bypass pipeline provides. Arne Lohmann Rasmussen, chief analyst at Global Risk Management, told Middle East Eye that roughly 30 percent of Europe’s diesel imports and half its jet fuel imports came from the Middle East entering 2026.

“This is very much a distillate crisis. A jet fuel and diesel crisis, especially in Europe,” Rasmussen said. Ellen Wald, founder of Transversal Consulting and author of the book “Saudi Inc.,” identified a further bind: maximizing Petroline’s crude throughput means abandoning its role carrying natural gas liquids and products.

“If the East-West pipeline is converted to carry all of Aramco’s crude oil exports to Yanbu, then it can’t also carry natural gas or products,” Wald told Middle East Eye. The bypass infrastructure forces a choice between crises.

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What Would It Actually Take?

The obvious question the crisis raises is whether the Gulf’s producers will now build what they declined to build over the past four decades. The answer, in the near term, is almost certainly no—and the reason is scale.

Fully replacing Hormuz’s throughput overland would require not one additional pipeline but several, each comparable in scope to the Petroline, running to export terminals that do not exist anywhere near the required capacity.

Dredging, marine loading berths capable of handling very large crude carriers, tank farms, and single-point mooring systems would need to be built at ports currently under attack. Janiv Shah, vice president of commodity markets at Rystad Energy, told The National that building meaningful additional bypass capacity is technically possible but “involves a lot of investment and requires time”—a formulation that understates the problem.

The IEA puts the current bypass ceiling at 3.5 to 5.5 million barrels per day across both pipelines. Closing the remaining 15 to 17 million barrels per day gap would require a construction program without precedent in the region’s infrastructure history, undertaken while the adversary targeting the existing terminals remains in the field.

A Lesson This Crisis Is Writing

The U.S. military is now assessing whether it can, with military force, do what decades of infrastructure investment did not: keep the strait open.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the prospect of escorting commercial vessels through Hormuz at a March 10 Pentagon briefing as requiring careful analysis of “what are the resources required, what is the command and control required, and what are the risks.” On March 13, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth asserted that Hormuz remains open and that “a few ships” have traversed without incident during a morning press briefing.

The U.S. government has moved to offer political risk insurance to shipping lines through the U.S. Development Finance Corporation—the same convoy-and-escort logic the U.S. Navy employed during the Iran-Iraq War, when Kuwaiti tankers were reflagged and escorted through the channel. It worked then. The threat environment is considerably more complex now.

What the crisis is demonstrating, with unusual clarity, is that the infrastructure gap between “partial bypass” and “full alternative” was always a choice, not an inevitability. The Petroline and ADCOP were deliberately sized to manage short disruptions, not replace the strait. For 40 years, that was a defensible bet.

The record suggests planners assumed Iran shared an interest in keeping the strait open and its drone technology was too imprecise—or too scarce—to systematically target dispersed port infrastructure. Both assumptions have been invalidated simultaneously.

The question energy infrastructure planners will face when this crisis resolves is whether the original bet can still be defended or whether the engineering calculus around Hormuz bypass capacity needs to be fundamentally reconsidered.