Oil Reroutes Around Hormuz While Gas Buyers Find No Exit

Oil Reroutes Around Hormuz While Gas Buyers Find No Exit Crude is finding pipelines past the strait, but LNG has no fallback, pushing Europe to lean harder on Norwegian gas like Equinor's expanded Troll field. Saudi Arabia has pushed its East-West crude pipeline to roughly 7 million barrels a day, rerouting Gulf cargoes to the Red Sea, oilprice.com reported on Sunday (2026-06-21), as the Strait of Hormuz blockade set off a pipeline-building rush among Gulf producers.⁸ The asymmetry runs through every market exposed to the strait. Oil can divert into spare pipeline capacity. LNG cannot. A gas analyst told Montel on Thursday (2026-05-21) that switching to pipeline flows is not an option for LNG as it is for crude, leaving the strait's gas trade without a fallback.¹ The chokepoint is large. The strait carried about 21 million barrels a day in 2022, roughly 21% of global petroleum liquids consumption, according to the EIA. The oilprice.com piece said the blockade paralysed close to a fifth of global LNG and crude flows. The EIA's May Short-Term Energy Outlook (2026-05-17) assessed that six Gulf producers, including Iraq and Qatar, collectively shut in 10.5 million barrels a day.^3,8⁶ Yet the tape is restrained. ICE Brent crude front-month traded at $79.55 on Monday (2026-06-22), up about 0.4%. For a disruption the EIA frames as a fifth of world oil flow, that is muted, and it reflects how much crude can route around the strait.^3,8 The bypass capacity is real, if finite. The EIA estimates roughly 3.5 million barrels a day of effective unused pipeline capacity could skirt Hormuz. The Saudi East-West line is rated at 5 million b/d and was pushed to 7 million b/d once before, in 2019. The UAE connects its onshore fields to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman through a link carrying up to 1.8 million b/d.^3,2 The UAE is moving fastest to widen that exit. Abu Dhabi's media office said on Friday (2026-05-15) the country would accelerate a new pipeline to double Fujairah export capacity by 2027. Semafor reported a 406-kilometre line from Abu Dhabi to Fujairah. ADNOC chief Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber said the second pipeline was 50% complete. ADNOC is targeting 5 million b/d of export capacity, a goal pulled forward by three years from the 4.85 million b/d it reported in May 2024.^2,5⁴ None of that helps gas. LNG has no pipeline workaround, so Qatari volumes that transit Hormuz reach their buyers or they do not move at all. JKM, the spot LNG marker, sat at $15.31 on Monday (2026-06-22). The most exposed side of this crisis is gas.¹ Europe's answer is to pull harder on the gas it controls. On Sunday (2026-06-21), oilprice.com reported that Equinor and its partners are investing more than NOK 4 billion ($390 million) to expand the Troll field, which supplies around 10% of Europe's natural gas and holds 40% of Norway's remaining reserves.⁷ The expansion, branded TWIN, is expected to unlock about 11 billion cubic metres of gas, roughly 69 million barrels of oil equivalent, enough to cover an estimated 2% to 3% of annual European demand. Set against Troll's resource base, that is modest. Equinor is targeting 1.3 million boe a day from the Norwegian continental shelf in 2035.⁷ For European pricing the link is direct. ICE Endex TTF front-month traded around €43.40 on Monday (2026-06-22), and every incremental cubic metre of Norwegian pipeline gas reduces the call on seaborne LNG that now carries chokepoint risk.^7,1 The case for a lasting crude premium rests on thin ground. The pipeline-boom narrative leans heavily on a single analysis, and the EIA's bypass estimate covers crude, not the gas that has no alternative route. The muted Brent tape suggests the market is pricing buffers and a reopening rather than a durable risk premium.^8,3¹ Watch whether ADNOC hits its 5 million b/d target on the accelerated timeline, whether Iraq and the other shut-in producers find their own routes out, and whether anyone engineers an LNG fallback where none exists. Until one appears, every Qatari cargo still depends on the strait staying open.^2,6¹