To the great dismay of Gulf energy exporters and global markets alike, the Strait of Hormuz is once again blocked due to hostilities between the United States and Iran. After a brief opening of the critical commercial waterway following a memorandum of understanding signed on June 17 to end the war, Tehran ordered the strait closed again on July 12, as the agreement broke down and fighting resumed.
Tanker traffic, which had recovered to a peak of about 50 vessels on June 24, is now effectively zero. With energy prices sharply on the rise, three bypass routes that allowed some members of the Gulf Cooperation Council export relief during the previous round of fighting have come back into play as critical global supply lines. But how effective are they, really?
Four months of satellite port data now allow a rough quantification of what they actually exported. Comparing April and May of this year against the same two months of 2025, one of the three—Saudi Arabia’s land bridge and East-West Pipeline to the Red Sea—recovered the majority of what its own Gulf coast export terminals lost. Another—the United Arab Emirates’ ports on the Gulf of Oman—also reduced exports alongside the ports on the trapped Gulf side. The third—Oman’s corridor to the Arabian Sea—was too small to register in its effect. When adding to the calculus the more recent closure of the Bab al-Mandab strait in the Red Sea, the outlook for circumventing the closure of Hormuz is further dampened.
Saudi Arabia’s Red-Sea Escape
Across April and May, Saudi Arabia’s Gulf coast shipped 41.2 million tons of cargo less than during the previous year, from 47.5 million tons in 2025 to a staggeringly low 6.3 million. Over the same two months, however, its exports on the Red Sea rose from 29.6 million tons to 54.8 million, nearly doubling its output. That 25.3 million-ton gain recovered 61 percent of Saudi Arabia’s own Gulf-side loss, demonstrating that not all of the tonnage that was expected to transit the Strait of Hormuz had been blocked. Moreover, among the three routes analyzed here, it is the only one that moved cargo at scale, and the reallocation of the East-West Pipeline to crude is proven in the port figures rather than just announced in press releases.
The UAE’s Troubling Reality
The Emirati case is the one that should unsettle the corridor debate, because on paper, the UAE has two major deepwater ports situated outside the strait, Fujairah and Khor Fakkan; that is, they were built for exactly this scenario. And yet their proximity to Iran renders them almost as vulnerable as if they were located on the other side of Hormuz. In May, for example, an Iranian drone set the Fujairah oil terminal ablaze, and multiple vessels sailing near the UAE’s eastern coast were also struck in separate incidents.
The effects of these attacks are visible in the export numbers. The UAE’s Gulf coast April-May traffic dropped from 68.5 million tons to 12 million, an 83 percent loss year over year. Yet the export tonnage from its alternative ports also fell, from 13.7 million tons to 6.3 million—a 54 percent decline. In other words, the alternative ports absorbed none of the displaced traffic and shed 7.4 million tons of their own. Traffic measured nationally decreased by 78 percent. Some of the Emirati decline can be attributed to a genuine ceiling on throughput, because Fujairah’s bunkering complex—where it loads crude oil and refined products—could simply not be expanded to the size of its main port, Jebel Ali, in short order. But the principal reason ships stopped calling is clear: carriers and insurers are reluctant to send vessels to embattled ports.
Oman Stays Flat, But Not the Same
While only a small, disconnected portion of Omani territory is located within the affected waterway, understanding the impact on its shipping is still important because the country theoretically provides an overland route for its Gulf neighbors.
Trucking through Oman has surged since the start of hostilities. Yet, Oman’s total export tonnage has remained flat over the period in question. That is largely because different ports were impacted unevenly according to their geography.
Sohar, Oman’s northern industrial port, sits about 120 kilometers (approximately 75 miles) from Iran and experienced a 3 million-ton, or 32 percent, reduction in its export tonnage. The southern port of Duqm, built a thousand kilometers down the coast from the Strait of Hormuz, increased its exports by about 0.35 million tons across the two months, and the large hub of Salalah, still further south, increased by 0.8 million tons.
The problem for the Omani bypass is twofold. First, the ports are only part of the corridor; the other part is the overland route. Yet the forbidding Rub al-Khali (Empty Quarter)—the world’s largest continuous sand desert—cuts Oman off from the rest of the peninsula, which is why the “Green Corridor” set up in March to connect Oman with Dubai via a bonded land corridor has so far failed to scale meaningfully. As Graeme put it back in 1976, “for all practical purposes Oman is an island surrounded by sea and sand; the sand proving to be the more formidable barrier.” Fifty years and a deepwater port later, little has changed. Duqm and Salalah lie on the far side of the sand from the Gulf economies the transit route is meant to relieve. The second reason is that, even far down the Arabian seaboard, ports and traffic are not completely safe. Duqm was hit as early as Salalah has been targeted repeatedly since March 3, as have vessels along the Omani coast. Therefore, distance certainly mitigates risk, but it does not eliminate it completely.
Tracking issues
The above figures are estimates based on AIS satellite vessel tracking data. That provenance invites an obvious objection: Tankers have tried to pass the Strait of Hormuz by “running dark,” so part of the collapse may be an artifice of ships switching off their transponders. However, any such “escape runs” are still enormously risky and are certainly the exception rather than the norm, affecting no more than 10 percent of stranded vessels, according to expert estimates and reconciliation with export/import data. Hormuz lost about 3.8 million tons a day of traffic. Bab al-Mandab, Suez and the Cape of Good Hope together gained around 0.6 million tons, under a sixth of it. Whatever the bypasses recovered, they recovered against that backdrop. Most importantly, even if AIS data may somewhat overestimate the Hormuz traffic collapse, it does paint a fairly accurate picture of the relative failure of the bypasses to pick up the slack.
The underperformance of the three bypasses can be explained by residual vulnerability and a lack of capacity. While the Saudi bypass and the southern ports in Oman are mostly a capacity issue—several attacks on both of them notwithstanding—the UAE faces a vulnerability issue. UAE has a dedicated Hormuz bypass of its own: the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline runs 380 kilometers from the Habshan fields to Fujairah, opens directly into the Gulf of Oman, and can carry up to 1.8 million barrels a day. The decline is thus largely due to vulnerability. Bypass infrastructure inside the adversary’s reach is a target, which is why building more of it inside the same radius does not resolve the problem.
Red Sea closure
Further complicating the bypass issue, Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, popularly known as the Houthis, declared a maritime embargo on Saudi Arabia on July 20, announcing that vessels calling at Saudi ports would no longer be granted safe passage through Bab al-Mandab. The five ports named include Yanbu, the terminus of the pipeline that made the one working bypass successful. War-risk premiums moved from around 0.3 percent of hull value to 0.75 percent within a day, and tankers began turning back in the Red Sea. To what degree Saudi traffic can reroute through the Suez Canal is questionable, first of all because Yanbu and the northern end of the Red Sea are within Houthi striking range, and also because fully laden Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) are too big to transit the Suez Canal. The coming weeks will demonstrate whether this latest development is a reenactment of the Houthi blockade of 2024-2025, which halved the number of Suez transit calls, and from which the canal has yet to recover.
Governments and firms across the Gulf have responded to the closure by planning new, northward overland corridors. However, those plans take years, cost more than double per ton than by sea, and would move a fraction of what the best comparator—the Middle Corridor—carries even after a decade of investment. But even then, the corridors still have to originate on the same Gulf coast that is currently under fire, since this is where the hydrocarbons are located. Iranian strikes devastated Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG facility—located on the Gulf side—on March 18 and hit a pumping station on the Saudi East-West pipeline on April 9, proving definitively that any corridor, whatever the route or destination, will be vulnerable at its point of departure. With no plausible, scalable alternative to the Arabian Peninsula’s two maritime chokepoints, any durable resolution must therefore center on a negotiated transit framework.
