Aramco Has No Fourth Route

DHAHRAN — Saudi Aramco has no viable fourth export route. CEO Amin Nasser confirmed in September 2026 that the company is studying “the engineering and the feasibility” of a “fourth and a fifth route” to move crude beyond the Strait of Hormuz and the East-West pipeline to Yanbu. He declined to name either corridor. The silence is telling: every named alternative — the UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah pipeline, the proposed Saudi-Oman line to Duqm, the forty-three-year-old Basra-Aqaba proposal, the dormant IPSA — has a hard capacity ceiling, a political barrier, or both. The study is not a plan. It is the admission that four decades of post-tanker-war planning left the world’s largest oil exporter with two corridors, and both are now compromised.

Saudi crude loadings fell from roughly 7.5 million barrels per day in early 2026 to approximately 2.3 million bpd by August, according to Al Jazeera. The kingdom’s revised 2026 budget deficit reached 245 billion riyals, with real GDP forecast to contract 3.6 percent, according to Reuters. The alternatives that analysts, officials, and energy executives have named do not add up. Their combined capacity is a fraction of what the strait carried before Iran mined it. The gap has existed for decades. The war made it visible.

What Did Amin Nasser Say About a Fourth Export Route?

Amin Nasser told Nikkei Asia in Tokyo on September 24, 2026, that Aramco is doing “the engineering and the feasibility and all of the work that is required” for a “fourth and a fifth route” for crude exports. He declined to disclose locations, telling Arabian Business that “details will be disclosed if and when a final decision is made.”

The language is revealing. Nasser did not announce a pipeline, a route, or a timeline. He announced a study. In the same interview, he acknowledged the crisis is structural: “I don’t think things are getting better. This crisis is not really getting better. The situation will get worse because this interruption is significant.” He added that Aramco had maintained operations — “We never stopped. We continue to supply our customers” — but conceded at the Energy Intelligence Forum in London that global oil stockpiles had become “scarily thin.”

The following day, Saudi Gazette carried a more measured Nasser statement: “disruptions typically last days, not weeks or months.” The remark came three days after the East-West pipeline had restarted, following a ten-day precautionary suspension, while the Strait of Hormuz had been under an Iranian blockade for more than two months. The distance between that characterisation and the Tokyo admission — made within the same 48 hours — shows how quickly Aramco’s public messaging had lost its footing.

Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman offered a parallel disclosure at a GCC forum in Manama on October 6. He said the East-West pipeline was flowing at 5.8 million barrels per day “as of this morning” and announced plans to raise total pipeline export capacity to 10 million bpd “within two to three years,” according to Al Jazeera. That expansion targets the existing corridor to Yanbu — more throughput through the same geography, to the same terminals, under the same military threat.

Nasser’s “fourth and fifth” routes describe something else entirely: corridors that would carry Saudi crude to a coast other than Yanbu and through a waterway other than Hormuz. No such corridor exists. The feasibility study is Aramco’s acknowledgment of that fact, delivered in the careful language of a company that cannot afford to name a route it has not yet secured.

How Much Oil Can the East-West Pipeline Move?

The East-West Crude Oil Pipeline has a design capacity of approximately 7 million barrels per day, according to Saudi Gazette. Commissioned in 1981 during the Iran-Iraq tanker war, it was built for precisely the scenario Saudi Arabia now faces: a Strait of Hormuz that crude carriers cannot safely transit. In the first quarter of 2026, it reached full capacity for the first time in its history, according to Rigzone.

Design capacity and export capacity are not the same figure. Yanbu’s terminals and port infrastructure impose a practical ceiling of roughly 4 to 4.5 million bpd on crude exports, according to Al Jazeera and Reuters. The remainder of the pipeline’s throughput feeds domestic refineries along the route, including the SAMREF facility at Yanbu. By August 2026, actual pipeline flows had fallen to approximately 2 million bpd, according to Kpler data cited by Al Jazeera — less than a third of the line’s nameplate capacity.

That Q1 record was instructive. In the best possible quarter, with the pipeline running flat out, Yanbu’s terminals could still handle only a portion of the kingdom’s total export requirement. The gap between what the pipeline could deliver and what Saudi Arabia needed to sell was, before Hormuz closed, an engineering footnote. When Iran mined the strait, it became a fiscal emergency. The barrels that depended on Hormuz had nowhere else to go.

The pipeline is Saudi Arabia’s only non-Hormuz export route at production scale. There is no second line, no parallel corridor through a different geography. Since its commissioning in 1981, the Petroline has been the sole land-based bypass, and every barrel that cannot pass through Hormuz must either transit Yanbu or remain in the ground.

Why Both Corridors Failed at Once

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the Strait of Hormuz closed after a series of tanker strikes, according to Middle East Eye. The IRGC imposed what it described as a “permit regime” requiring all vessels to coordinate passage with Iranian forces — a wartime blockade framed as sovereign regulation. CENTCOM reported that 135 ships had been turned around since the blockade began on July 14, according to CBS News. A supertanker carrying more than 2 million barrels struck a mine in the strait, according to NewsCord. The insurance market responded by effectively closing Hormuz to commercial traffic, and Iran turned the threat into declared policy.

The East-West pipeline was supposed to absorb the redirected crude. It could not. On March 19, a Houthi strike hit the SAMREF refinery at Yanbu, according to Marine Insight. On April 9, an attack on a pumping station cut East-West flows by 700,000 bpd, according to The New Arab. Saudi Arabia suspended the pipeline entirely on September 12 as a precaution following attacks in the Riyadh and Madinah regions, according to Saudi Gazette via Zawya. The line restarted on September 22, but full capacity would take “six weeks or more,” according to Reuters via Baird Maritime.

Recovery was real but incomplete. By October 6, the pipeline had reached the throughput that Prince Abdulaziz cited at the GCC forum. Rystad Energy analyst Rahul Choudhary had earlier estimated a restart at “40 to 60 percent capacity” initially, according to Al Jazeera. Then came October 16. Coalition spokesman Turki al-Maliki announced on X that Saudi forces had “intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile launched in the direction of Yanbu,” along with two cruise missiles over the Red Sea and three drones over Saudi territory, according to Tribune India.

The same day, Iranian state broadcaster IRIB reported that the East-West pipeline had been “targeted again” and that a “thermal anomaly” had been detected near Yanbu, according to Newsquawk. Saudi authorities did not confirm damage. France had already deployed troops, radars, and air defences to the Yanbu corridor, according to Al Jazeera. The bypass route now requires its own standing military protection — a structural vulnerability that no throughput figure can resolve.

The diplomatic backdrop made the military pressure more legible. Iran’s foreign minister Araghchi had presented a seven-day roadmap via Qatar in September, offering to reopen Hormuz in exchange for sanctions waivers, an end to the US naval blockade, and approximately $12 billion in frozen assets, according to Al Jazeera. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump rejected the proposal and expected renewed bombing after the midterm elections. With diplomacy stalled, Iran’s position hardened. The blockade remained “in full force,” according to The National. The dual-corridor pressure was not improvised; it was the military expression of a negotiating stance that had no counterpart at the table.

Iran’s messaging on October 16 was coordinated. The mine strikes that closed Hormuz and the IRIB-amplified claims of pipeline targeting near Yanbu projected simultaneous pressure on both exit corridors. Whether the October 16 pipeline report was accurate or propaganda, the signal was identical: neither route is safe, and Iran intends both to remain contested.

Can Any Named Alternative Absorb Saudi Export Volume?

No existing pipeline can close the gap. The UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah line carries Emirati crude with no infrastructure connecting it to Saudi oil fields. The SUMED pipeline sits downstream of Yanbu: when Yanbu’s throughput falls, SUMED’s available feedstock falls with it. The dormant IPSA has not carried a barrel since Iraq seized it in 1990. The US Energy Information Administration puts combined Saudi and UAE bypass capacity at roughly 4.7 million bpd against approximately 20.9 million bpd of pre-war Hormuz flows, according to CNBC. The table below shows why each named route fails on its own terms.

Sources: CNBC/EIA (Habshan-Fujairah, combined bypass capacity); EIA via Hellenic Shipping News (SUMED); Gulf International Forum, June 2026 (Basra-Aqaba); Ocean Energy Resources/Rystad Energy, October 2026 (Duqm).

The table exposes a structural reality: not one of these routes can move Saudi crude at meaningful scale today. The two that operate — Habshan-Fujairah and SUMED — serve other countries’ oil or depend on the very corridor they would need to bypass. The three that could theoretically serve Saudi Arabia — IPSA, Basra-Aqaba, Duqm — are dormant, unbuilt, or at the feasibility stage.

IPSA deserves particular attention. Saudi Arabia already owns the pipeline. It runs across the northern part of the kingdom, built in 1989 to carry Iraqi crude to the Red Sea. Iraq seized it after invading Kuwait in 1990. In the decades since 1990, neither Riyadh nor Baghdad has moved to reactivate it for Saudi use. The infrastructure exists physically. The political and operational will to convert it does not. Even at full nameplate, IPSA would cover less than a quarter of the export volume Saudi Arabia was loading in early 2026.

SUMED illustrates the downstream dependency that makes the alternatives list shorter than it appears. The pipeline runs from the Gulf of Suez to the Mediterranean, carrying crude that has already transited the Red Sea from Yanbu. In normal conditions, tankers loaded at Yanbu sail south through the Bab al-Mandab Strait and discharge at Ain Sukhna for SUMED transit to Sidi Kerir on the Mediterranean coast. If Yanbu loadings fall — because the East-West pipeline is damaged, suspended, or below capacity — SUMED has less crude to relay. It is a downstream extension, not a bypass. Its nameplate capacity is real, but it cannot generate supply that does not arrive at its inlet.

The Habshan-Fujairah line presents a different kind of impossibility. It is a functioning, well-maintained pipeline — but it belongs to Abu Dhabi, serves ADNOC crude, and has no physical tie-in to the Saudi pipeline network. Building such a connection would require a cross-border infrastructure agreement between two countries whose Yemen partnership collapsed, according to CNN.

What Would New Pipelines to Duqm or Aqaba Cost?

A Saudi-Oman pipeline to the port of Duqm on the Arabian Sea would be the most geographically transformative option on the table. Duqm sits on the Arabian Sea coast, outside both the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, and Oman has invested heavily in the port’s industrial zone. Rystad Energy analyst Rahul Choudhary estimated the pipeline’s cost at up to $7 billion, according to Ocean Energy Resources. TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné confirmed at an investor day in September 2026 that Saudi Arabia has “begun to work” on such a pipeline, according to Ocean Energy Resources. The project remains at the feasibility stage. No capacity has been confirmed, no construction timeline has been set, and no route has been finalised.

The Basra-Aqaba pipeline between Iraq and Jordan has been discussed since 1983. The Gulf International Forum estimated its cost at $4.6 to $9 billion in a June 2026 study. Since it was first proposed in 1983, no steel has been laid. The project requires coordination between Baghdad and Amman, port infrastructure at Aqaba that does not yet exist for crude-scale exports, and secure transit across western Iraq. Four decades of discussion have produced four decades of inaction.

Saudi chief economist Yaser Faqih told the Milken Institute Asia Summit in October that Riyadh is also scouting export routes through Syria-Turkey and Iraq-Syria, according to EnterpriseAM. He offered no capacity figures, no cost estimates, and no partner commitments. The mere act of scouting these speculative corridors — through countries engaged in their own conflicts and instabilities — confirms that no viable option is close to execution.

Duqm and Aqaba share a common limitation: they are proposals, not projects. A greenfield pipeline of the scale required would take years from approval to first oil under peacetime conditions. Saudi Arabia is not building under peacetime conditions. It is building under a sustained aerial campaign that has already struck the Petroline’s pumping stations, the SAMREF refinery at Yanbu, and — if Iranian state media is to be believed — the pipeline corridor itself. Construction timelines assume security that the current environment does not provide.

The Freight Market Already Priced the Gap

The absence of alternative export routes is not a theoretical vulnerability. The tanker market has already priced it. Freight costs from the Persian Gulf reached approximately $33 per barrel in September 2026, compared with $1.73 per barrel in January, according to Nikkei Asia. The Gulf-to-China VLCC rate hit $1.2 million per day, against roughly $80,000 a year earlier, according to LSEG data cited by bdnews24.

Brent crude topped $108 per barrel on September 24, according to Al Jazeera, and stood at $102.94 on October 9, according to CNBC. The premium reflects not congestion but route risk: the market’s assessment that the physical infrastructure to move Saudi crude safely to buyers does not exist at the scale required.

“With the East-West pipeline offline, Saudi’s options are limited,” Rishi Rajanala, an analyst at LSEG, told Al Jazeera in September. Richard Matthews of Gibson Shipbrokers said that any vessels attempting Hormuz transit would “further fuel higher freight costs.” Louis Vincent-Gave of Gavekal Research warned that the attacks on the pipeline “suddenly place large question marks on the ability of Saudi oil to keep flowing through the Red Sea.”

The freight market does not distinguish between a route that is blocked and one that does not exist. Both produce the same price signal. Saudi Arabia is absorbing both premiums simultaneously: Hormuz is mined, and the infrastructure that was supposed to carry the redirected crude is under sustained attack. A barrel routed through the East-West pipeline to Yanbu and onto a tanker in the Red Sea now carries a security premium that did not exist when the pipeline was built. The premium will not decline until new capacity is operating or the military threat is removed. Neither is imminent.

The Study Is the Admission

Aramco reported revenue of 606.5 billion riyals — approximately $162 billion — in 2025, representing more than half of Saudi government revenue, according to Al Jazeera. The company is the fiscal foundation of the Saudi state and the largest crude exporter on earth. Its export infrastructure should reflect that position. It does not.

The East-West pipeline, built forty-five years ago as a tactical response to Iranian mining during the tanker war, remains the only land-based export bypass that Aramco operates. In the decades since its commissioning, Saudi Arabia built new cities, launched a sovereign wealth fund, and embarked on an economic transformation that staked the kingdom’s future on continued oil revenue. Vision 2030 turned Saudi Arabia into a global systemic risk — a country whose fiscal survival depends on uninterrupted crude exports flowing through infrastructure that a single adversary can disrupt.

The failure was not one of imagination. Saudi planners understood the Hormuz vulnerability in 1981 when they built the Petroline. They understood it again when IPSA was completed in 1989 and promptly lost to Iraq a year later. They watched the Basra-Aqaba proposal stall for four decades. They saw the UAE commission the Habshan-Fujairah line — a functioning bypass that Abu Dhabi built for its own crude, demonstrating that such projects are technically achievable. At no point in those forty-five years did Riyadh commission a second non-Yanbu corridor under its own sovereign control. IPSA sat idle. Basra-Aqaba stayed on paper. The Duqm proposal arrived as an emergency response, not a planned asset.

The cost of that omission is now measurable. Oil activities are forecast to contract 21.8 percent in 2026, according to Reuters — a figure driven almost entirely by the export disruption. The kingdom built no redundancy into the infrastructure that funds its state, its transformation programme, and its debt service. The corridors that carry that revenue are compromised simultaneously, and there is nothing behind them.

When Nasser told Nikkei Asia that Aramco was studying a “fourth and a fifth route,” he was not projecting confidence. He was describing a deficit. The fourth route does not exist. The fifth does not exist. The feasibility study is the evidence that Aramco entered the worst disruption since the 1980s without the infrastructure to sustain full export capacity through it.

The Hormuz blockade can end. The attacks on Yanbu can stop. The freight premium can fall. But the structural vulnerability — two corridors, no backup at production scale — will persist until steel is in the ground and oil is flowing through it. Nasser’s study will not produce a pipeline before the next crisis. It may not produce one before this crisis is resolved.

The East-West pipeline was built in response to one Iranian mining campaign. It worked for four decades because no second campaign came. Now that Iran has both mined the strait again and signalled its willingness to contest the Red Sea corridor, the single-bypass assumption has collapsed. Aramco’s feasibility study is the first step in rebuilding the assumption on new ground. But feasibility is not steel, and a study is not a barrel.

Forty years of warning were not enough. The engineering has only just begun.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is Aramco moving crude while both corridors are compromised?

Aramco has moved approximately 60 million barrels from Ras Tanura for ship-to-ship transfer off Sohar, Oman, between September and October 2026, according to EnterpriseAM. These transfers use floating storage to stage crude outside the most contested waters before onward loading to destination tankers. The approach is a logistical workaround rather than a replacement route: it depends on the same tanker fleet absorbing elevated freight costs, and the Ras Tanura loading terminal sits inside the Persian Gulf, within the orbit of Hormuz disruption.

Could oil prices reach $120 per barrel?

Goldman Sachs warned in September 2026 that Brent crude could reach $120 per barrel if Gulf output remains 4 million barrels per day below pre-war levels, according to Nikkei Asia. The International Energy Agency reported that Saudi output alone fell 2.6 million bpd in August, according to Trend news agency — more than half of Goldman’s threshold. If Iranian military pressure persists on both export corridors and no additional bypass capacity comes online, the gap between available supply and pre-war demand widens rather than narrows, increasing the probability of a sustained price spike above current levels.

How has Aramco adjusted its crude pricing to retain buyers?

Aramco cut its November Arab Light official selling price to Asia to $5 below the Oman/Dubai benchmark — the widest discount since June 2020 — according to Reuters via bdnews24. At the same time, it raised prices to northwest Europe by $3. The split pricing signals a strategic redirect: discounting for Asian buyers who must accept longer, costlier routing around the Cape of Good Hope, while lifting prices for European refiners who can receive Yanbu-sourced barrels via shorter Red Sea and Mediterranean tanker runs. The approach protects market share in Asia at the expense of per-barrel revenue.