The math problem
About 17 million barrels of crude oil and refined products pass through the Strait of Hormuz every day. That is roughly 20 percent of global oil consumption. The strait is 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point, with two navigable channels each about two miles wide. In normal times, a VLCC passes through every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. The throughput is staggering. It works because the channel is deep, the traffic management is practiced, and the route is direct. Any alternative has to match at least a fraction of that volume to matter. Let me walk through every option, from most to least viable.
Saudi Petroline: the best option, still not enough
The Saudi East-West pipeline, known as Petroline, runs 1,200 kilometers from Abqaiq in the Eastern Province to Yanbu on the Red Sea. It was built in 1981, during the Iran-Iraq War, specifically as a Hormuz bypass. Its original capacity was 3.2 million barrels per day. Saudi Aramco expanded it to 5 million barrels per day in the 2000s. The pipeline is currently operating at or near capacity, moving Saudi crude to Red Sea terminals where it can be loaded onto tankers without passing through Hormuz.
Five million barrels per day is significant. It represents about half of Saudi Arabia's total production. But it leaves the other half stranded on the Gulf side. Saudi Aramco has studied expanding the pipeline to 7 million barrels per day by adding pump stations and looping sections of the line. A 2019 feasibility study estimated the cost at $3.5 billion and the timeline at 18 to 24 months. In a crisis where every day matters, 18 months is an eternity.
There is also the question of Yanbu's loading capacity. The Red Sea terminal can currently load about 5.5 million barrels per day across its single-point mooring systems and conventional berths. Even if the pipeline could move 7 million, the terminal could not load it all without expansion. And the Red Sea has its own problems. Houthi forces in Yemen have attacked ships in the southern Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb strait. A tanker loading at Yanbu still has to pass through Bab el-Mandeb to reach the Suez Canal or, if heading to Asia, sail around the Horn of Africa. The Red Sea is not the safe haven it once was.
UAE Habshan-Fujairah pipeline: small but strategic
The UAE built the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline after Iran threatened to close Hormuz in 2012. It runs 380 kilometers from the oil fields at Habshan, inland of Abu Dhabi, to the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, outside the Strait of Hormuz. Current capacity is 1.8 million barrels per day. The UAE has announced plans to expand it to 2.5 million, but construction has not yet begun.
Fujairah is the world's second-largest bunkering port after Singapore and a major oil storage hub. It has approximately 12 million cubic meters of tank storage capacity, about 75 million barrels. The port can load VLCCs at its offshore loading points. The pipeline is already running at capacity. Every barrel that goes through Fujairah is a barrel that does not have to pass Hormuz. But 1.8 million barrels per day is a fraction of what the UAE produces and exports. The rest still goes through the strait. Or it would, if the strait were open.
The Fujairah option has one advantage that the Petroline does not: it terminates on the Gulf of Oman, which means tankers loaded at Fujairah can sail directly to Asia without passing through either Hormuz or Bab el-Mandeb. For cargoes heading east, it is the cleanest bypass available. The problem is volume. The UAE produces about 3.2 million barrels per day. The pipeline can carry 1.8 million. The remaining 1.4 million has no alternative exit.
The Iraq-Turkey pipeline: a mess
The Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline runs 970 kilometers from northern Iraq to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. Its capacity is about 1.6 million barrels per day on paper. In practice, it has been running well below that for years due to disputes between the federal government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government over revenue sharing and control. The pipeline was shut down entirely in March 2023 after an International Chamber of Commerce arbitration ruling in a dispute between Iraq and Turkey. It resumed limited operations in late 2024 at around 400,000 barrels per day. As of May 2026, throughput is approximately 600,000 barrels per day.
Even at full capacity, 1.6 million barrels per day is modest. And the pipeline has reliability problems. It has been sabotaged, bombed, and shut down by political disputes more times than anyone can count. The section running through southeastern Turkey passes through an area that has seen periodic conflict with Kurdish militant groups. Betting on this pipeline as a reliable bypass is not a serious proposition. It can help at the margins. It cannot replace Hormuz.
Cape of Good Hope: longer, not bigger
Rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope is the most commonly mentioned alternative to Hormuz. It is also the most misunderstood. The Cape route does not create new oil. It simply extends the voyage time for oil that would otherwise go through the Suez Canal or, in the case of Gulf crude, through Hormuz and then around India. For non-Gulf oil, specifically crude from West Africa, Brazil, and the US Gulf of Mexico, the Cape route adds about 10 to 14 days to a voyage to Asia compared with the Suez route. That means fewer voyages per year per ship, which means you need more ships to move the same volume.
The problem is ship availability. The global VLCC fleet numbers about 900 vessels. Before the crisis, roughly 300 of those were dedicated to the Gulf-Asia route. With Hormuz closed, those 300 ships are either trapped in the Gulf or sitting idle outside it. The remaining 600 VLCCs are on other routes. You cannot simply reassign them all to Cape-of-Good-Hope runs without abandoning their existing contracts. The effective additional capacity from Cape rerouting, based on my calculations and those of two shipbrokers I consulted, is roughly 300,000 additional barrels per day of non-Gulf crude that can be redirected to Asian buyers. That is less than 2 percent of what Hormuz moves.
I want to be clear about what the Cape route can and cannot do. It can keep some oil moving from the Atlantic basin to Asia. It cannot compensate for the loss of 17 million barrels per day from the Gulf. Anyone who tells you that ships can "just go around" does not understand the scale of the problem. Going around adds time. It does not add barrels.
Every other idea
People have proposed all sorts of alternatives. Trucking oil overland from Saudi Arabia to Jordan. It has been done on a small scale, but the maximum throughput is about 30,000 barrels per day, which is 0.2 percent of Hormuz volume. Expanding the SUMED pipeline in Egypt, which runs from the Gulf of Suez to the Mediterranean. But SUMED only works if oil can reach the Gulf of Suez, which means it has to come through the Red Sea, which brings us back to the Houthi problem. Rail tank cars from Gulf ports to the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia does not have the rail capacity, and building it would take years.
There have also been discussions about converting LNG terminals on the Red Sea coast to handle crude, but LNG terminals are designed for a completely different product. The storage tanks are cryogenic, the loading arms are sized for gas carriers, and the pipeline connections run to gas processing facilities, not refineries. The conversion cost would run into the billions and the timeline would be measured in years.
The honest answer is that there is no alternative to Hormuz that can move more than about 7.7 million barrels per day, and even that figure requires optimistic assumptions about pipeline reliability, Red Sea security, and terminal capacity. The remaining 9.3 million barrels per day, more than half of what the strait normally carries, has nowhere else to go. The Strait of Hormuz is not just a shipping lane. It is a geographic fact. You cannot engineer around it on any relevant timescale. The only solution is political: getting the strait open again. Everything else is a bandage on a wound that needs surgery.