The Bypass Map: What Actually Moved Oil While Hormuz Was Shut

Date: June 1, 2026 (Day 94) Type: WEEKLY DEEP DIVE Reading Time: ~12 min Panels: Pipeline Engineer, Energy Strategist

TL;DR

• Pre-crisis, the Strait of Hormuz carried ~20M bbl/day of crude and products, ~20% of seaborne oil, plus ~20% of traded LNG. Since transits fell to near zero around May 6, the question is mechanical: how much of that flow can physically take another road out of the Gulf?
• The honest answer is ~1/3. Add up every overland route that actually moved barrels during the crisis and the real-world ceiling is ~6.5-7M bbl/day of crude. That leaves ~13-14M bbl/day of Hormuz crude with no alternative, and it leaves Qatar’s LNG with essentially none.
• Only one major pipeline physically exits the Gulf without touching Hormuz: the UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah line to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, ~1.5-1.8M bbl/day. Saudi Arabia’s much larger East-West line reaches the Red Sea at Yanbu but then hands its barrels to a second chokepoint, Bab el-Mandeb, in a Houthi fire zone.
• Iran’s own Goreh-Jask bypass, designed for up to ~1M bbl/day, never became a working route. Iraq’s northern Kirkuk-Ceyhan line moved ~250K bbl/day intermittently, and Turkey is terminating the 1973 agreement effective ~Jul 27.
• Russia is not a Gulf bypass but it is the substitution story: ESPO to China plus Baltic, Black Sea, and Pacific seaborne never touch Hormuz, so Russian barrels captured share into India and China while Gulf crude sat stranded.

The Denominator Nobody Can Move

Start with the number that frames everything. Hormuz moved ~20M bbl/day of crude and refined products pre-crisis, ~20% of global seaborne oil. It also carried ~20% of internationally traded LNG, almost all of it Qatari. That is the hole that opened when open transits fell to near zero around May 6, and it is the denominator every bypass figure has to be measured against.

The instinct in a closure is to ask which pipelines can be turned up. That is the wrong first question. The right first question is where a barrel that leaves the pipeline actually gets onto a ship, and whether that ship can reach open water without crossing another contested strait. A pipeline is only as useful as the terminal at its far end and the sea lane past that terminal. On both counts the Gulf is short.

Two routes physically leave the Persian Gulf overland: the Saudi East-West (Petroline) line west to the Red Sea, and the UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah line east to the Gulf of Oman. Everything else is either a seaborne route that still has to thread Hormuz, or a marginal northern line through Turkey, or a paper bypass that never carried wartime volume. Below is what each one can actually deliver, not what its nameplate says.

Capacity Table: Nameplate vs. What Actually Moved

Route	Exit point	Nameplate	Wartime-usable	Limiting factor
Saudi East-West (Petroline)	Yanbu, Red Sea	~7M bbl/day line (~5M available for export)	~3-4M bbl/day	Yanbu terminal loading ceiling, then Bab el-Mandeb / Houthi transit
UAE Habshan-Fujairah (ADCOP)	Fujairah, Gulf of Oman	~1.5-1.8M bbl/day	~1.7-1.8M bbl/day at peak	Pipeline headroom (~440K spare); Fujairah is a single point of failure; refinery feed competes
Iran Goreh-Jask	Jask, Gulf of Oman	~0.3-1M bbl/day design	~0	Line incomplete/underused; Jask terminal exposed and struck
Iraq Kirkuk-Ceyhan (ITP)	Ceyhan, Turkey (Med)	~1.6M bbl/day nameplate (offline since 2023)	~250K bbl/day intermittent	Flows security-dependent; 1973 agreement terminates ~Jul 27
Qatar LNG (Ras Laffan)	None outside Hormuz	n/a	~0 bypass	No overland gas route exists; 100% Hormuz-dependent
Gulf-bypass crude total			~6.5-7M bbl/day	vs. ~20M bbl/day normal Hormuz flow

The table is the whole argument. The nameplate column looks reassuring. The wartime-usable column does not. And the gap between them is not engineering pessimism, it is where the binding constraints actually sit: at terminals, at second chokepoints, and at lines that were never finished.

Saudi East-West (Petroline): Big Line, Smaller Valve

The Petroline is the largest piece of bypass infrastructure in the region and the one most people point to first. It runs ~1,200 km from the Abqaiq processing hub in the Eastern Province to Yanbu on the Red Sea. After Aramco converted its NGL lines to crude service, the system carries a ~7M bbl/day nameplate, of which Aramco says ~5M bbl/day is available for export with the balance feeding west-coast refineries. Aramco reported the line back to full capacity ~Apr 12 after the Jubail-area attacks. Pre-crisis it ran only ~2M bbl/day, so the wartime ramp is real.

Here is the catch the nameplate hides. The binding constraint is not the line. It is the Yanbu terminals. The two terminals at Yanbu cap nominal combined loadings near ~4.5M bbl/day, market sources put tested throughput closer to ~4M, and Vortexa estimates ~3M under wartime conditions. So even with ~5M bbl/day arriving at the coast, the kingdom can only put ~3-4M bbl/day onto ships. The crude that cannot load backs up, and the only way to relieve it is to slow the line. The valve at the end of the pipe is narrower than the pipe.

Then comes the second problem, which is geographic rather than mechanical. A barrel loaded at Yanbu is on the Red Sea, not in open ocean. To reach Asian buyers, or to reach Europe via Suez, it has to transit Bab el-Mandeb at the southern end of the Red Sea. The Houthis joined the war Mar 28 and have explicitly threatened to close that strait. So the Petroline does not remove chokepoint risk. It swaps Hormuz for Bab el-Mandeb. For the highest-volume bypass in the region, the far end of the route sits inside a second fire zone, and the loading terminal caps throughput below what the line can deliver. Call it ~3-4M bbl/day of genuinely usable bypass, contested.

Habshan-Fujairah (ADCOP): The Only True Exit

The UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah line is the single most important true bypass in the Gulf, and it is worth being precise about why. It runs ~360 km from the Habshan gas-processing complex in Abu Dhabi’s Western Region to the Fujairah terminal on the Gulf of Oman coast. Fujairah sits outside the Strait of Hormuz. A barrel that loads at Fujairah is already in open water on the Indian Ocean side. It never enters the strait at all.

That makes Fujairah the Gulf’s relief valve. It is the one place where Gulf crude reaches a deep-water loading point without crossing Hormuz or Bab el-Mandeb. Through the crisis ADNOC pushed throughput toward nameplate, with reports of ~1.7-1.8M bbl/day at peak and only ~440K bbl/day of headroom against the ~1.5-1.8M bbl/day capacity. There is a planned West-East expansion that would about double Fujairah capacity, but it is not operational until 2027, so it does nothing for this crisis.

The constraints here are different from Saudi Arabia’s. The line is the limit, not a downstream terminal, and Vitol’s ~82K bbl/day Fujairah refinery draws crude off the same pipe, so refinery feed competes with export volume. Fujairah is also a single point of failure: there is no redundant non-Hormuz terminal behind it, and earlier strikes on the Fujairah oil-industry zone already damaged storage tanks. If Fujairah goes down, the UAE loses its only relief valve. But while it runs, it is the genuine article: ~1.7-1.8M bbl/day of crude that leaves the Gulf clean. Of the entire bypass map, this is the only line that does what the headlines claim all of them do.

Goreh-Jask: The Bypass Iran Built and Could Not Use

Iran spent years building its own answer to a Hormuz closure: the Goreh-Jask pipeline, carrying crude from the fields to a new terminal at Jask on the Gulf of Oman, outside the strait. On paper Jask was designed to export up to ~1M bbl/day, with some segments rated lower at ~0.3M bbl/day. The strategic logic was sound. If Iran ever closed Hormuz, Jask would let it keep exporting while everyone else was trapped.

It did not work out that way. The line was incomplete and underused going into the crisis, and the Jask terminal was exposed and struck. With Hormuz choked, Iran ended up with no operational route to move crude outside the strait either. Its main export terminal at Kharg, inside the Gulf, was already non-operational. The bypass Iran built to escape its own chokepoint became a bypass it could not turn on. For modeling purposes, Goreh-Jask contributed ~0 to wartime bypass capacity. It is a cautionary tale about the difference between a commissioned line and a working export chain.

Kirkuk-Ceyhan: The Northern Trickle on a Clock

Iraq’s only non-Hormuz route is the northern Iraq-Turkey Pipeline from Kirkuk to Ceyhan on the Turkish Mediterranean coast. Its nameplate is ~1.6M bbl/day, but decades of conflict and a 2.5-year shutdown have left it moving ~250K bbl/day intermittently as of June, with flows that stop and start on regional security. Against Iraq’s ~3M bbl/day of southern Basra exports, all of which are Hormuz-trapped, the northern line is a trickle. It rescues less than ~10% of Iraqi export volume.

It also runs on a clock. Turkey moved to terminate the 1973 pipeline agreement effective ~Jul 27, 2026, with a replacement framework still under negotiation. If that deal lapses while Hormuz stays choked, Iraq loses its only working bypass with no southern alternative. Iraq has ~35.5M barrels of storage against ~4.2M bbl/day of capacity, which means tanks saturate in ~25-30 days and force field shutdowns. The country has no tanker fleet of its own and no domestic pipeline to the Mediterranean or Red Sea. A proposed ~2.25M bbl/day Basra-Haditha line that would cut Hormuz dependence is years and large capital away. For this crisis, Iraq’s bypass is ~250K bbl/day, fragile, and expiring.

Russia: Not a Bypass, the Substitution

Russia belongs on the map for a different reason. It is not a Gulf bypass at all. Its export system simply never touches Hormuz. ESPO runs ~1.6M bbl/day overland from Taishet to Kozmino on the Pacific, feeding China directly. Baltic terminals (Primorsk, Ust-Luga), Black Sea (Novorossiysk), and Pacific loadings all sit outside the Gulf entirely. None of it is exposed to a Hormuz closure.

That immunity turned into market share. With ~13-14M bbl/day of Gulf crude blocked, the buyers most exposed, India and China, leaned on the supply that could still reach them. Russian crude captured share into both: India’s Russian share spiking toward ~47% at the crisis peak, China at record intake, ~1.6M bbl/day each at the peak. Urals flipped to a delivered-Asia premium that reached ~$8/bbl in late April before compressing as Brent eased toward ~$91 on ceasefire and MoU hopes. The price premium is reversing now. The volume share is stickier. Russia is the structural winner of a Hormuz closure precisely because it built no bypass: it never needed one.

The Math, and the Thesis

Add the working routes. Yanbu delivers ~3-4M bbl/day to ships, contested past Bab el-Mandeb. Fujairah delivers ~1.7-1.8M bbl/day, clean. Goreh-Jask delivers ~0. Kirkuk-Ceyhan delivers ~250K bbl/day on a route to Turkey, not the Gulf coast, and on a July clock. Combined Gulf-bypass nameplate is ~6.5-7M bbl/day, and the genuinely usable, uncontested figure is lower still once you discount the Bab el-Mandeb risk on the Saudi leg.

Against ~20M bbl/day of normal Hormuz flow, that is ~1/3. Even with every line maxed and every terminal pushed to its tested ceiling, ~two-thirds of Hormuz crude has no alternative road out of the Gulf. The barrels do not vanish because the pipelines are broken. They are stranded because the geography only offers two overland exits and one of them empties into a second chokepoint.

And that is only crude. The LNG picture is starker. Qatar moves ~77 MTPA out of Ras Laffan, ~20% of traded LNG, and there is no overland gas bypass anywhere in the Gulf. You cannot put LNG in a pipeline to the Red Sea or truck it past Fujairah. Every molecule of Qatari LNG has to transit Hormuz by ship. The bypass capacity for Gulf LNG is ~0.

This is why the engineering reality drove the diplomacy. No amount of pipeline ramp-up was going to refloat the global oil and gas market while Hormuz stayed shut, because the physics simply does not allow ~two-thirds of the crude and ~all of the LNG to be rerouted. Which is the uncomfortable conclusion: through this entire crisis, the volume that mattered most was not anything a pipeline moved. It was the barrels Iran let through Hormuz under its selective transit regime. When the only real relief valve is a chokepoint your adversary controls, “Iran lets some ships through” outranks any pipeline on the map.

What to Watch

• Yanbu loadings, not Petroline throughput. The terminal ceiling (~3-4M bbl/day) is the true Saudi bypass number. Pipeline-capacity headlines overstate deliverable volume.
• Bab el-Mandeb risk on the Saudi leg. A Houthi closure threat turns the largest bypass from contested into useless. Watch the far end of the Red Sea, not just Yanbu.
• Fujairah operational status. It is the only clean exit and a single point of failure. Any strike on the Fujairah oil-industry zone removes the one true bypass.
• The Jul 27 Kirkuk-Ceyhan expiry. If the Turkey agreement lapses while Hormuz stays choked, Iraq loses its only working bypass.
• Russian share stickiness into India and China. The price premium is unwinding as Brent eases; the volume capture is the durable shift, and how much returns when Gulf barrels come back is the open question.
• LNG has no answer. Watch Qatari Ras Laffan transits directly, because there is no pipeline story to fall back on for gas.