India Bets on Oman and a Gulf Corridor to Ride Out the Hormuz Closure

India Bets on Oman and a Gulf Corridor to Ride Out the Hormuz Closure With the Strait of Hormuz shut and 13 million barrels a day of oil supply lost, New Delhi routes around the chokepoint as Washington weighs a deeper role. On Friday (2026-06-05), the Atlantic Council mapped out India's narrowing energy options around the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, the infrastructure plan unveiled at the 2023 Group of Twenty in New Delhi and backed by India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Israel and the EU. Its energy pillar is meant to link Indian ports to European markets through the Gulf, and Washington has an opening to help build it.⁷ That matters because the Strait of Hormuz, through which most of India's crude and LNG flows, is closed. As of 2026-05-20 the world had lost 13 million barrels a day of oil supply, the IEA's Fatih Birol told CNBC, calling it the biggest energy security threat in history. India imports the bulk of its oil, and almost none of its workaround routes are ready.² The numbers from inside the Gulf are stark. More than 1 billion barrels of oil have been lost since the strait closed, with nearly 100 million additional barrels stranded every week it stays shut, ADNOC chief executive Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber said on Wednesday (2026-05-20). Even if the conflict ended immediately, he said, flows would take at least four months to climb back to 80% of normal.¹ Producers are improvising. The UAE has redirected some crude through an existing pipeline to Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman side of the chokepoint, which can carry up to 1.8 million barrels a day, and has built nearly half of a second bypass line, Al Jaber said.¹ India is making its own bet, on Oman. New Delhi is leaning on the sultanate as a primary re-exporting and logistics hub, a move that sits outside the strait and feeds Oman's Vision 2040 industrial plans while creating supply-chain jobs and lifting its maritime revenue, oilprice.com reported on Tuesday (2026-06-02). For a country where hydrocarbons still drive up to 85% of government revenue, the arrangement gives Muscat a reason to keep the cargoes moving.⁶ The US angle is where the Atlantic Council sees leverage. A deeper American role in the corridor and in India's diversification would bind New Delhi closer to Washington at a moment when its rivals are doing the opposite.⁷ Russia and China are already moving. Both are quietly stepping into Asia's oil shock, with one Russian state-fund boss noting that Moscow's voice grows louder whenever crude trades above $100, The Economist reported on 2026-05-17. China has released some 360,000 barrels of fuel to Vietnam and the Philippines, according to Bloomberg.⁵ India is not scrambling alone. Across Asia, importers are scouring new suppliers, with Thailand turning to Nigeria and Kazakhstan and Vietnam to Angola and Argentina, while Asian LNG has spiked above $25 after damage to Qatar's export plants compounded the blockade.^3,4 The risk for India is that every alternative is slower or smaller than the route it lost. The Fujairah line and the half-finished UAE bypass cannot replace full Hormuz throughput, the Oman hub is a logistics fix rather than new barrels, and IMEC remains a corridor on paper with no energy steel in the ground.^1,6⁷ What to watch is whether Washington turns the Atlantic Council's framing into anything concrete, and whether the four-month ramp clock Al Jaber described even starts — because it only begins once the strait reopens, and as of the weekend it has not.^7,1