Beyond Hormuz: The pipeline routes that could reshape Gulf oil flows

The crisis around the Strait of Hormuz has sharply accelerated both short-term rerouting and longer-term pipeline planning, creating renewed political momentum behind several bypass routes.

Key takeaways:

• The Saudi East–West Pipeline is running below capacity, with export infrastructure at Yanbu — not the pipeline itself — limiting throughput.
• The UAE's proposed Hamriyah–Fujairah pipeline is in early planning and could be operational within three years, offering a meaningful additional bypass corridor.
• IPSA rehabilitation faces a prohibitive combination of decades of disrepair and deep political complexity between Riyadh and Baghdad, making a near-term restart unlikely.
• The Basra–Aqaba pipeline would require an estimated $10 billion in new construction, several years to complete, and would traverse a security-sensitive corridor through Anbar province.
• The Kirkuk–Ceyhan pipeline's theoretical capacity of 1.6 Mbd is well beyond practical reach, constrained by severe physical degradation, chronic operational instability, and Iraq's south-heavy production base.
• The Kirkuk–Baniyas revival remains commercially and financially unviable in the near term, blocked by Syrian sanctions, fragmented territorial control along the route, and the near-impossibility of securing Western financing or insurance.

Previous regional pipeline plans were repeatedly suspended or shelved due not only to prohibitive costs and logistical complexity, but also to the geopolitical challenges inherent in cross-border infrastructure. Inter-country pipelines, in particular, have historically proven difficult to advance, requiring sustained political alignment, security guarantees, and long-term cooperation between often competing states.

The current disruption, however, has fundamentally shifted that calculus. A new set of geopolitical incentives — driven by the war and the urgent need to mitigate reliance on the Strait of Hormuz — is reviving momentum behind projects that had long stalled. Looking ahead, several pipeline options could be expanded, reactivated, or newly built to reduce dependence on the Strait. All such projects, however, would require substantial capital investment and would likely take several years to come online.

Two bypass routes are already operating at high utilisation — Saudi Arabia's East–West (Yanbu) Pipeline and the UAE's ADCOP pipeline — allowing both countries to route exports around the Strait. The most immediately actionable steps would therefore centre on expanding capacity within these existing corridors: debottlenecking and enhancing the East–West Pipeline, and building additional parallel capacity alongside ADCOP to Fujairah. Crucially, these options avoid the political and logistical complexity of new cross-border infrastructure.

‍