How Saudi Arabia Moves Oil Without the Strait of Hormuz: The Petroline East-West Pipeline

About two-thirds of it. Saudi Arabia can move roughly 4 to 4.5 million barrels per day of crude to market without touching the Strait of Hormuz, against the 6.4 million barrels per day that normally leaves the Kingdom through it. The instrument that does the moving is the Petroline east-west pipeline, and the number that matters is not its capacity but the gap between its capacity and the port at the far end.

That gap is the reason this page exists. The Petroline is rated at 7 million barrels per day and reached that figure in March 2026, its highest recorded throughput, when the war that began on 28 February shut the strait. But crude has to be loaded onto a ship, and Yanbu’s berths take about 4.5 million barrels per day on paper, closer to 4 million in sustained practice. Roughly 1.9 million barrels per day of the pipeline’s delivery is consumed by west-coast refineries before reaching a berth at all. Run the line flat out and 600,000 to 1.1 million barrels a day arrive at the coast with nowhere to load.

A pipeline is not an export route. It is one segment of an export route, and it is not the segment that binds.

The Petroline, in one paragraph. The East-West Crude Oil Pipeline, known commercially as the Petroline, is a roughly 1,200-kilometre Saudi Aramco crude line from Abqaiq in the Eastern Province to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Commissioned in 1981 during the Iran-Iraq tanker war, it exists so that Saudi crude can reach a coast outside the Strait of Hormuz. Its nameplate capacity is 7 million barrels per day.

Last verified: 31 July 2026.

This page is the mechanical explainer: what the infrastructure is, how it physically works, what it can and cannot do, and why the arithmetic constrains policy. It is deliberately not the news. For the 2026 event — the concentration of Saudi crude into one loading complex, the July strikes, the closure timeline and the tracker dispute — see Yanbu as a single point of failure for Saudi oil exports. For the strategic framing as it stood in May 2026, see Saudi Arabia’s Hormuz bypass and Red Sea logistics strategy. For the city itself, see the Yanbu encyclopedia entry. This page restates none of them.

What Is the Petroline Pipeline?

The Petroline is Saudi Aramco’s crude oil trunk line across the Arabian Peninsula, running roughly 1,200 kilometres from the Abqaiq processing complex in the Eastern Province to the terminals at Yanbu [S6]. “Petroline” and “East-West Crude Oil Pipeline” name the same asset. It is not general-purpose logistics: it was built for exactly the situation the Kingdom found itself in during 2026.

Why It Was Built in 1981

Construction was commissioned during the Iran-Iraq War, when the Gulf tanker war made loading crude inside the Strait of Hormuz a live commercial risk [S6]. The strategic logic has not changed since: Saudi Arabia’s oil is in the east, its customers reach it by sea, and the only sea exit from the east is a strait 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest with Iran on the northern shore. A line to the Red Sea puts a second coast between the Kingdom’s reserves and any single navigational veto.

That the Petroline was conceived as an Iran-war hedge and then used as one 45 years later is the strongest thing that can be said for Saudi infrastructure planning. What follows is the qualification.

What the 2019 Conversion Actually Did

For most of its life the Petroline was rated at 5 million barrels per day [S5]. The system is two parallel lines — a crude trunk and a second line originally laid for natural gas liquids, the Abqaiq-Yanbu NGL pipeline, historically rated at around 290,000 barrels per day of NGL service [S5]. The NGL line fed Yanbu’s petrochemical complex rather than its export berths.

Capacity was raised to 7 million barrels per day by converting that parallel line to crude service — a change the US Energy Information Administration recorded as Saudi Arabia converting “one of the two pipelines connected to the Petroline system back to transporting crude oil” [S1]. The published record dates the decisive uplift to 2019, after the drone strikes on Abqaiq.

The mechanically important point is that this required almost no new steel. Throughput in a pipeline of fixed diameter is set by pumping power and by friction, not by the pipe. Operators raise capacity by adding or upgrading pump stations and by injecting drag-reducing agents — long-chain polymers that suppress turbulence at the pipe wall [S5]. That is why the Kingdom could add 2 million barrels per day of theoretical capacity in months rather than years, and why the option is now spent. Converting an existing parallel line is a one-off. There is no third line to convert.

How Much Oil Can Saudi Arabia Move Without Hormuz?

Roughly 4 to 4.5 million barrels per day — and the figure is set by Yanbu’s berths, not by the Petroline east-west pipeline.

Start with what normally moves. The Joint Organisations Data Initiative recorded Saudi crude exports at 6.19 million barrels per day in May 2025, against production of 9.18 million [S7]. Almost all of it left through Gulf terminals inside the strait; Yanbu’s share in the comparable 2025 period averaged 973,000 barrels per day. The Red Sea route was a minor outlet, not a parallel system.

Cargo tracker Kpler put Yanbu’s June 2026 loadings at 4.1 million barrels per day, and assessed that as roughly 64% of the Saudi crude that would normally have left through Hormuz [S14]. That implies a normal Hormuz-routed volume near 6.4 million barrels per day, and a shortfall of about 2.3 million barrels per day.

One dating caution applies throughout. The strait has had two closure phases: 28 February 2026 to a partial reopening on 18 June, then re-closure after the Islamabad Memorandum collapsed on 8 July, with a maritime embargo from 20 July. Lloyd’s List Intelligence counted 78 Hormuz transits in the week of 13-19 July against 174 the week before [S9]. June figures therefore describe the partial reopening, not either closure at full force.

Three independent measures converge on the same answer:

The third row is the confirming evidence and the most quietly damning. Saudi production did not fall by 2.6 million barrels per day because the Kingdom chose restraint, and not because reservoirs failed. It fell because barrels that cannot be loaded cannot be produced. The International Energy Agency records Saudi output at 6.44 million barrels per day in May 2026 rising to 7.34 million in June, against an OPEC+ allocation of 10.291 million [S10] — a variance of nearly 3 million barrels per day that is a berth problem wearing the costume of a quota decision. The upstream is fine; the quay is not.

The systemic version is starker. The EIA assesses that the Saudi east-west pipeline and the UAE’s Abu Dhabi line together could provide about 4.7 million barrels per day of bypass capacity, against total Hormuz oil flows of 20.9 million barrels per day in the first half of 2025 — about 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption and a quarter of all seaborne traded oil [S1]. Every pipeline in the Gulf that avoids the strait, added together, covers under a quarter of what the strait carries.

Why the Port Binds Before the Pipeline Does

Yanbu’s loading capability is split across two terminals: Yanbu North at roughly 1.5 million barrels per day and the larger Yanbu South complex at about 3 million, for seven berths in total [S6]. Aramco’s own 2018 announcement of the South terminal describes deep-water berths built for very large and ultra-large crude carriers of up to 500,000 deadweight tonnes [S8]. Each berth can in theory turn round one VLCC per day; in practice a full VLCC load takes 24 to 36 hours before scheduling, inspection and queueing are added.

Engineering News-Record’s engineering analysis puts the operationally tested rate nearer 4 million barrels per day, and lower again in wartime conditions once berthing friction and security procedures apply [S6]. Kpler reaches the same structural conclusion from the cargo data. In the firm’s research note on Gulf bypass routes, analyst Victoria Grabenwöger writes that “the binding constraint lies not within the pipeline itself but at the export terminals downstream” [S3].

This is the most misunderstood feature of the Hormuz bypass, and it inverts the intuition. The instinct is to ask whether the pipe is big enough. The pipe has been big enough since 2019. What is not big enough is the number of places a ship can tie up at the other end.

The asymmetry also governs what can be fixed. Pipeline capacity is cheap and fast to add, because pumping is modular. Berth capacity is neither: a deep-water crude berth is a marine civil-engineering project measured in years, requiring dredging, breakwaters, loading arms, metering and tankage behind it. Engineering News-Record’s framing — that this infrastructure was sized for a short disruption rather than an open-ended one — is the correct engineering read [S6]. AGBI reports an east-west expansion of roughly 2 million barrels per day under consideration, specifics unclear [S4]. Even if built, it would deliver more crude to the same seven berths.

Does the East-West Pipeline Avoid All Chokepoints?

No. It substitutes one chokepoint for another, and the substitute has been degraded for longer.

This is the part most explainers miss. Yanbu is on the Red Sea, and the Red Sea is not open ocean. It is a 2,250-kilometre corridor with exactly two exits: Bab al-Mandeb in the south, roughly 18 miles across at its narrowest and bordered by Yemen, Djibouti and Eritrea; and the Suez Canal with the parallel SUMED pipeline in the north. A cargo loaded at Yanbu has not escaped chokepoint risk. It has changed which chokepoint it depends on.

The EIA’s series shows what that substitution was worth before it was needed:

Flows through Bab al-Mandeb fell by 56% between 2023 and 2024 [S1], driven by the Houthi campaign against Red Sea shipping that began in late 2023. The escape hatch was already half shut two years before the Hormuz closure that made it load-bearing. Any assessment of Saudi export resilience that treats Yanbu as a safe route is counting a route whose downstream strait had already lost more than half its traffic in peacetime.

The northern exit is real but narrow in a different sense. A fully laden VLCC cannot transit the Suez Canal on draught. Cargo must either part-discharge into the SUMED pipeline — about 2.5 million barrels per day from Ain Sukhna on the Gulf of Suez to Sidi Kerir on the Mediterranean — or move on Suezmax tankers of roughly one million barrels instead of a VLCC’s two. SUMED genuinely avoids Bab al-Mandeb. What it does not do is reach Asia; it delivers to the Mediterranean, and Europe takes a minority of Saudi crude.

Which exposes the geometry problem underneath the whole design. The EIA recorded 82% of Hormuz crude and condensate going to Asian markets, with China, India, Japan and South Korea alone accounting for 67% of all Hormuz flows [S2]. Asia is east. Yanbu is west. The Petroline east-west pipeline moves a barrel 1,200 kilometres in the wrong direction for four-fifths of the customers, and the ship must then sail back around the Arabian Peninsula anyway. The bypass does not shorten the journey to the buyer. It lengthens it, in exchange for not passing Iran.

A cargo from Yanbu to South Korea takes roughly 24 days through Bab al-Mandeb, and about 54 days routed north through Suez on two Suezmaxes rather than one VLCC. That is why the Red Sea security picture is a component of Saudi energy policy rather than a side issue.

How Long Can Saudi Arabia Export if Hormuz Closes?

Indefinitely — at about two-thirds of normal volume. This is the question most readers get backwards, so it is worth stating plainly: there is no countdown clock. The constraint is not a stock that depletes, it is a flow that is capped. Saudi Arabia does not run out of the ability to export after N days. It exports roughly 4 million barrels a day instead of roughly 6.4 million, for as long as the strait stays shut.

Storage does not change that steady state. It smooths the transition into it, and it is smaller than most readers assume.

Aramco’s disclosed overseas positions are three: leased tankage at Okinawa in Japan, a position at Sidi Kerir on the Egyptian Mediterranean coast at the northern end of SUMED, and a 16.7% interest in the Maasvlakte Oil Terminal at Rotterdam. Only Okinawa has a published volume — 13 tanks holding roughly 1.3 million kilolitres, about 8.2 million barrels, leased from Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation [S11].

Set 8.2 million barrels against Yanbu’s loadings of roughly 4.1 million barrels per day and the answer is two days. Even assuming Sidi Kerir and Rotterdam together match Okinawa, total disclosed overseas cover is under a week of exports.

More revealing than the size is the contract. The Okinawa terms give Japan priority access to the crude in an emergency [S11]. That is the tell: this tankage is not a Saudi war reserve but a market-share instrument, positioned next to buyers to shorten lead times and reassure them — a commercial asset whose emergency clause runs in the customer’s favour, not the seller’s. Sidi Kerir and Rotterdam sit next to European refiners on the same logic.

Crude storage behind the Yanbu berths themselves is not public, and that is the number that would actually matter for a berth outage. Its absence is a genuine gap in the record, not an oversight in this analysis.

Who Else Has a Hormuz Bypass?

Only the United Arab Emirates, and its bypass is better than Saudi Arabia’s — smaller, but structurally superior, because it reaches open water rather than a second enclosed sea.

The Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline runs from Habshan to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman — a coast outside the Strait of Hormuz and outside any other strait. A tanker loading at Fujairah is already in open water. Kpler recorded ADCOP carrying roughly 30% of UAE crude loadings across 2025, rising to about 80% in April 2026, at 1.82 million barrels per day that month, above the line’s 1.5 million nameplate [S3]. A parallel West-East 2 line was more than half built as of May 2026 and is targeted at 2027, which would roughly double Fujairah’s throughput [S4] [S12]. Eric Soosay, an analyst at Welligence, told AGBI the UAE “is fast-tracking” the project [S4].

The consequence showed up in the export data. Wood Mackenzie recorded Gulf crude exports across all producers collapsing from 18.8 million barrels per day in January 2026 to 3.4 million in June, with Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar all going to zero while the UAE held near 560,000 barrels per day at Fujairah [S13]. That divergence is the whole argument for open-water access, and it sharpens the asymmetry between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi since the UAE left OPEC effective 1 May 2026.

Iraq’s IPSA line is the ghost at this table. Built in the late 1980s to run Iraqi crude across Saudi Arabia to the Mu’ajjiz terminal north of Yanbu, it has a nameplate of about 1.65 million barrels per day and has carried no Iraqi crude since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 [S5]. Saudi Arabia expropriated it in 2001 against Iraqi debts and later used sections to move gas to western power plants. Reviving it is a legal problem before an engineering one: the asset is Saudi, the crude Iraqi, with no mechanism to reconcile the two. AGBI found no public talks on restarting it [S4]. Nick Holland of Marsh’s risk advisory practice put the general constraint on the record: cross-border projects “can take considerably longer because bilateral or multilateral agreements need to be negotiated alongside the engineering work” [S4]. That is why the map of Gulf bypass capacity has barely changed in a decade.

Kuwait and Qatar have no equivalent, and geography explains why. Kuwait sits at the head of the Gulf; any line to a non-Hormuz coast would cross Saudi Arabia or Iraq for more than a thousand kilometres, turning an engineering question into a sovereignty question. Qatar’s problem is harder still: liquefied natural gas cannot be piped to a distant coast at all, because LNG requires a liquefaction plant at the point of loading and Qatar’s is at Ras Laffan, inside the Gulf. There is no pipeline answer to a Qatari Hormuz closure.

What the Arithmetic Means for Saudi Policy

The capacity numbers set a hard ceiling on what Riyadh can credibly say.

A state that could genuinely reroute around Iran would hold a strong hand: it could treat a Hormuz closure as an inconvenience priced into someone else’s calculations. Saudi Arabia cannot say that. It can say that a closure costs it roughly a third of its crude exports, indefinitely, and that the third is not recoverable by any asset now in the ground. At Brent near $90, 2.3 million barrels per day is roughly $207 million of gross export value a day, about $75 billion a year — not a fiscal receipt, but a measure of what the bypass fails to carry.

Three consequences follow, and each is more binding than it looks.

Spare capacity becomes notional. Aramco’s maximum sustainable capacity of 12 million barrels per day underpins Saudi Arabia’s standing as the market’s balancing producer, but spare capacity is worth only what can be delivered from it. With the Gulf terminals unusable and Yanbu capped near 4.5 million barrels per day, the swing producer’s swing is a set of berths. The same logic empties out the OPEC quota framework: an allocation of 10.291 million barrels per day against 7.34 million of actual output is not restraint, and reading it as policy rather than as physics produces the wrong forecast. Both OPEC decisions and the monthly output increases agreed through 2026 are taken in a market where the largest member’s entitlement exceeds its ability to load.

Pricing shifts from the barrel to the voyage. When the constraint moves downstream, so does the margin. Freight, war-risk cover and berth availability begin doing work the crude differential used to do — which is why Aramco’s August official selling price reads better against route economics than against demand, and why, through the second and third quarters of 2026, the transmission from oil prices to the Saudi economy ran through logistics rather than the wellhead.

Deterrence runs the wrong way. A pipeline that concentrates a nation’s exports into one Red Sea complex tells anyone reading a map where to apply pressure. Redundancy that funnels into a single terminal is not redundancy; it is a relocated single point of failure. That argument, and the July 2026 evidence for it, belongs to the Yanbu single-point-of-failure analysis, and this page defers to it.

Why This Matters for Vision 2030

Vision 2030 rests on an assumption that hydrocarbon revenue is the dependable variable funding the undependable one. The Petroline arithmetic qualifies that assumption in a specific way: the Kingdom’s oil reserves and production capability are not the constraint on oil revenue. Delivery is. The oil dependency paradox has always been framed as exposure to a price nobody controls; the pipeline arithmetic adds exposure to a route nobody controls either.

There is a second, sharper irony. Vision 2030 markets Saudi Arabia as a logistics hub bridging three continents, and the western coast — Yanbu, Jeddah Islamic Port, the Red Sea corridor overseen by the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu — is the showcase for it. The Petroline is the most rigorous available test of that claim, and it returns a split verdict: the Kingdom can move crude across a continent-scale peninsula on demand, and it cannot get that crude onto enough ships at the far end. Corridors are only as good as their weakest segment, which is the entire thesis of the ports and maritime programme.

Risks, Contradictions and Open Questions

Yanbu’s effective loading capacity is not published by its operator. The 4.5 million barrels per day nominal figure and the roughly 4 million tested figure come from Engineering News-Record and are corroborated by cargo-tracker behaviour, not by Saudi Aramco or the Aramco institutional record, which publish no berth-level series. Treat the port ceiling as well-evidenced but not official.

The trackers disagree on Yanbu’s actual throughput. Kpler’s 4.1 million barrels per day for June 2026 and Wood Mackenzie’s 2.39 million are roughly 70% apart, most likely because they measure gross terminal loadings against Red Sea bypass volumes. Neither firm has published a methodology note. The dispute does not affect this page’s argument, which turns on capacity rather than utilisation, but any single-number claim about Yanbu throughput is tracker-dependent.

Two production series disagree. The EIA’s Q2 2026 average of 6.70 million barrels per day and the IEA’s June figure of 7.34 million are not like-for-like: one is a quarterly average spanning the worst weeks, the other a single month during the partial reopening. Both are cited above with their issuer named. Neither is wrong; averaging them would be.

Pump-station counts and exact line diameters vary across published accounts and could not be confirmed against an Aramco engineering document; published lengths also round between 1,200 and 1,202 kilometres. The figures used here are limited to those multiple independent sources support: length, capacity, the two-line configuration and the conversion history.

Whether Yanbu can be expanded is genuinely unknown. No public plan exists to add crude berths, and no timeline has been announced for the roughly 2 million barrels per day of east-west expansion AGBI reports as under consideration [S4]. Berth construction runs to years, and the 2019 conversion that produced the last capacity uplift consumed the only cheap option.

Saudi tank farm capacity behind the Yanbu berths is not disclosed — the number that would determine whether a berth outage costs days or weeks of exports.

What to Watch Next

• The UAE’s West-East 2 pipeline, targeted for 2027. If Fujairah’s capacity roughly doubles to over 3 million barrels per day, Abu Dhabi’s structural advantage in a Hormuz closure widens against a Saudi position that is fixed at the berths.
• Any announcement of new crude berths at Yanbu. This is the only development that would change the arithmetic on this page. Pipeline announcements would not.
• Bab al-Mandeb flow data against the EIA’s 9.3 million barrels per day 2023 peak. Until southern Red Sea traffic recovers toward that level, the Petroline’s downstream exit remains degraded independent of anything happening at Hormuz.
• Whether IPSA re-enters public discussion. A Saudi-Iraqi agreement on the mothballed line would be the first genuine addition to Gulf bypass capacity in a decade. AGBI found no talks as of July 2026.
• Disclosure of Yanbu tankage. Aramco’s H1 2026 results on 4 August 2026 are the next scheduled opportunity for any operational detail on the western export chain.

Related Vision 2030 Context

• Yanbu is now a single point of failure for Saudi oil exports — the 2026 event, the strike and the closure timeline.
• Saudi Arabia’s Hormuz bypass and Red Sea logistics strategy — the May 2026 strategic framing.
• Yanbu and the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu — the terminal city and its administrator.
• Saudi Arabia’s oil exports — volumes, grades and destination markets.
• Saudi Aramco and the Aramco institutional profile — operator of the Petroline and the Yanbu terminals.
• Saudi Arabia’s industrial cities — the Jubail-Yanbu dual-coast industrial design the pipeline serves.
• The UAE’s departure from OPEC and the swing-producer question — why Fujairah changes the balance.
• Downstream refining — the west-coast refinery intake that takes 1.9m bpd before the berths.
• The Iran war and Saudi economic fragility — the macro backdrop to the 2026 closure.

Sources

• [S1] US Energy Information Administration, “World Oil Transit Chokepoints”, special topics analysis, accessed 31 July 2026. Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb flow series; combined Saudi-UAE bypass capacity of about 4.7 million b/d. https://www.eia.gov/international/content/analysis/special_topics/World_Oil_Transit_Chokepoints/
• [S2] US Energy Information Administration, “The Strait of Hormuz Is the World’s Most Important Oil Transit Chokepoint”, Today in Energy, 2023 (2022 and 1H23 data). Destination shares: 82% of crude to Asia; China, India, Japan and South Korea 67% of flows. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61002
• [S3] Kpler, “Beyond Hormuz: The Pipeline Routes That Could Reshape Gulf Oil Flows”, research blog by Victoria Grabenwöger, 2026. Terminal-versus-pipeline constraint; ADCOP loadings and share. https://www.kpler.com/blog/beyond-hormuz-the-pipeline-routes-that-could-reshape-gulf-oil-flows
• [S4] AGBI, “Great Gulf Pipeline Race: Which Routes Will Actually Be Built?”, analysis, July 2026. Habshan-Fujairah capacity, West-East 2 status, proposed Saudi expansion, IPSA and Tapline status. https://www.agbi.com/analysis/oil-and-gas/2026/07/great-gulf-pipeline-race-which-routes-will-actually-be-built/
• [S5] Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law, University of Texas at Austin, “Strait of Hormuz: Alternate Export Routes”, reference brief, accessed 31 July 2026. Petroline 5m b/d baseline, Abqaiq-Yanbu NGL line at 290,000 b/d, IPSA at 1.65m b/d, drag-reducing agents. https://www.strausscenter.org/strait-of-hormuz-alternate-export-routes/
• [S6] Engineering News-Record, “Hormuz Bypass Infrastructure Was Sized for a Short Disruption. This Is Not That.”, analysis, July 2026. Yanbu terminal capacity and tested loading rate. The publisher blocks automated retrieval; figures here are as carried in ENR’s published summary and matching trade coverage. https://www.enr.com/articles/62677-hormuz-bypass-infrastructure-was-sized-for-a-short-disruption-this-is-not-that
• [S7] Arab News, “Saudi Crude Exports Rise to 6.2m bpd: JODI”, news report, 21 July 2025, citing Joint Organisations Data Initiative figures for May 2025. https://www.arabnews.com/node/2608895/business-economy
• [S8] Saudi Aramco, “Yanbu South Terminal Export Capacity”, company release, 2018. Terminal berths and vessel classes. The domain did not respond to automated retrieval on 31 July 2026; berth counts here are corroborated by ENR and trade coverage. https://www.aramco.com/en/news-media/news/2018/yanbu-south-terminal-export-capacity
• [S9] Lloyd’s List Intelligence, “Strait of Hormuz Brief: 21 July 2026”, data brief, 21 July 2026. 78 transits 13-19 July against 174 the prior week. https://www.lloydslistintelligence.com/resources/blog/strait-of-hormuz-brief-21-july-2026
• [S10] International Energy Agency, Oil Market Report, July 2026 edition. Saudi crude output 6.44m b/d in May and 7.34m b/d in June 2026 against a 10.291m b/d allocation. https://www.iea.org/reports/oil-market-report-july-2026
• [S11] Argaam, “Japan, Aramco Renew Okinawa Crude Oil Storage Contract for 3 Years”, news report, citing the JOGMEC lease terms: 13 tanks, about 1.3 million kilolitres, with Japanese priority access in an emergency. https://www.argaam.com/en/article/articledetail/id/1860277
• [S12] The National, “UAE’s West-East Pipeline Expansion to Become Operational in 2027, Doubling Oil Export Capacity”, news report, 15 May 2026. https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/energy/2026/05/15/uaes-west-east-pipeline-expansion-to-become-operational-in-2027-doubling-oil-export-capacity/
• [S13] Hydrocarbon Engineering, “Wood Mackenzie: Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Crude Bypass Peaks in March and Declines 41% by June”, industry report, 27 July 2026. Gulf-wide export collapse; Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar to zero; UAE holding at Fujairah. https://www.hydrocarbonengineering.com/special-reports/27072026/wood-mackenzie-saudi-arabias-red-sea-crude-bypass-peaks-in-march-and-declines-41-by-june/
• [S14] Al Jazeera, “Can the Suez Save Asian Oil Consumers After Houthis Shut Bab al-Mandeb?”, analysis, 22 July 2026, citing Kpler. Yanbu June 2026 loadings of 4.1m b/d and the share of normal Hormuz-routed Saudi crude. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/22/can-the-suez-save-asian-oil-consumers-after-houthis-shut-bab-al-mandeb