Kuwait Says It Can Reach 2 Million Bpd Within a Week as Hormuz Blockade Nears 11 Weeks
Gulf producers scramble to replace barrels stranded by the closed strait, with roughly 100 million lost each week the waterway stays shut.
Kuwait said it could raise crude output to 2 million barrels per day within a week, according to Oilprice.com, a sign that Gulf producers are still trying to replace the supply lost to the Strait of Hormuz blockade.5
The stakes for oil markets sit in the duration. The strait has been near-shut for close to 11 weeks, the waterway through which about 20% of the world's oil and seaborne gas moved before the Iran war, the Guardian reported, and the closure has pushed energy prices higher while throttling Gulf economies.1
The losses are large and still accruing. More than 1 billion barrels of oil have been lost since the strait closed, ADNOC chief executive Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber said in an interview on Wednesday (2026-05-20), and nearly 100 million additional barrels are lost every week the waterway stays shut.2
That flow is hard to replace because Hormuz normally carries so much. In 2022 the strait moved an average of 21 million barrels per day, about 21% of global petroleum liquids consumption, according to EIA data.3
Prices, though, are no longer at crisis levels. ICE Brent crude front-month traded near $75.70, up 0.16% on the day, well below the peaks reached earlier in the disruption. [live prices] Traders had first expected the closure to last days, not weeks, the Economist noted, and the market now sits in a range that reflects a prolonged but partial cut rather than a full collapse.4
The UAE has moved fastest to build redundancy. Abu Dhabi has completed nearly 50% of a second pipeline that would bypass the strait entirely, Al Jaber said, and has already redirected some exports through an existing line to Fujairah that can handle up to 1.8 million barrels per day.2 That onshore link to the Fujairah terminal on the Gulf of Oman was sized at 1.5 million barrels per day, EIA figures show.3
Saudi Arabia holds its own buffer. Saudi Aramco operates the 5-million-barrel-per-day East-West crude pipeline and temporarily lifted its capacity to 7 million in 2019 by converting some natural gas liquids lines to carry crude, the EIA said.3 Across all Gulf states, the agency estimates roughly 3.5 million barrels per day of effective unused pipeline capacity could bypass the strait during a supply disruption.3
Those routes are not shielded from the wider conflict. The longer the war runs, the more exposure the alternative lines carry, both to direct attack and to the drag of higher shipping insurance, delayed tanker scheduling and redirected cargoes, the Economist reported.4
Signals across desks still lean bullish, yet the read is not uniform. European gas front-month has shown a bearish divergence against the crude-led move, a reminder that the same catalyst is not pulling every market the same way.4
The binding question for Gulf exports is loading, not pumping. The pipelines exist and the announced targets are real, but replacing near 100 million barrels a week takes time, and Al Jaber's own estimate of that weekly loss shows how far aggressive output goals still sit from closing the gap.2