UAE Half-Builds Hormuz Bypass as Blockade Enters 11th Week

UAE Half-Builds Hormuz Bypass as Blockade Enters 11th Week ADNOC's second Fujairah pipeline targets completion next year, but current bypass capacity of 1.8 million bpd falls well short of weekly losses. Saudi Arabia has shipped roughly 34 million barrels of crude through the Strait of Hormuz since the June 17 ceasefire, Kpler cargo-tracking data show, even as only about 27 commercial vessels per day have been transiting the waterway. The numbers illustrate how thin the corridor has become — and how much Gulf producers are still depending on it.⁶ On Thursday (2026-05-28), that dependence looked acute. No commercial vessels were spotted transiting the strait during a morning spike in tensions following a second round of US strikes, according to Rigzone. The ceasefire has not restored normal shipping; it has opened a trickle.⁴ Into that gap, Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. has built nearly 50% of a second pipeline to bypass the waterway entirely, ADNOC CEO Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber said on Wednesday (2026-05-20). The new line targets completion next year. The existing route already links onshore UAE oil fields to the Fujairah export terminal on the Gulf of Oman and has been pushed to its maximum capacity of 1.8 million bpd.^2,1 The arithmetic is uncomfortable. Al Jaber said more than 1 billion barrels of oil have been lost since the strait's closure, with nearly 100 million additional barrels lost every week the waterway stays shut. Against those volumes, 1.8 million bpd of bypass capacity covers only a fraction of what the UAE needs to move. The second pipeline, once finished, adds capacity — but it is a medium-term answer to an immediate problem.² Saudi Arabia faces a harder version of the same constraint. Aramco said in its first-quarter earnings that the East-West pipeline to the Yanbu port reached its maximum capacity of 7 million bpd. The pipeline was originally built for 5 million bpd and was temporarily expanded to 7 million bpd in 2019 when the company converted some natural gas liquids lines to accept crude. No further expansion has been announced.^5,3 Riyadh has been moving barrels through Hormuz anyway. The 34 million barrels Kpler tracked since the June 17 ceasefire works out to roughly 1.4 million bpd traversing a waterway most commercial operators still consider hazardous — the kind of figure that depends on the ceasefire holding.⁶ The waterway's longer-term significance is hard to overstate. In 2022, Hormuz carried an average of 21 million barrels per day, equivalent to about 21% of global petroleum liquids consumption, according to EIA data. A full closure does not shift that volume to alternative routes overnight; it removes it from the market.³ China's more than 1.2 billion barrel stockpile has absorbed much of the disruption so far, and global inventories remain elevated. Saudi Arabia's Yanbu re-routing has cushioned supply, but those East-West barrels are maxed out, leaving no room if Hormuz deteriorates again.⁵ ICE Brent crude front-month was at $84.72 per barrel on Monday (2026-08-10), up 0.37%. Prices embed a partial reopening of the strait, not the kind of transit volumes seen before the Iran war. The market has not priced a durable re-opening. The bloc of waterways is the wider concern. If Houthi attacks disrupt tanker traffic through Bab el-Mandeb, Saudi Arabia could lose part of its Yanbu export route as well, according to an oilprice.com analysis citing the Red Sea risk. The world would then lose millions of additional barrels per day on top of the roughly 13 million already affected by the Hormuz closure. Higher freight rates, increased fuel consumption, and supertankers rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope would follow.⁵ For the UAE, the second Fujairah pipeline carries strategic weight beyond raw throughput. Al Jaber framed it in explicitly geopolitical terms on Wednesday (2026-05-20): "Right now, too much of the world's energy still moves through too few chokepoints." A second line would let Abu Dhabi decouple its export schedule from a single maritime bottleneck — though it will not be ready until next year.² In the interim, the signal to watch is daily transit counts through Hormuz. The roughly 27 vessels per day recorded by Kpler since the ceasefire is already thin by any pre-war standard. If that number falls again — as it did on Thursday (2026-05-28) when it dropped to zero — the calm implied by current Brent pricing will have less and less physical reality behind it.^6,4