Fujairah sits on the Gulf of Oman coast of the United Arab Emirates, on the far side of the Hajar Mountains from Dubai and Abu Dhabi. For most of its history it was the smallest and least developed of the seven emirates, with a fishing economy and a geography that made connection to the Emirati interior difficult. What transformed Fujairah was the recognition, by Abu Dhabi planners and international oil traders simultaneously, that a port on the Gulf of Oman side of the UAE was worth more than a port on the Arabian Gulf side because it lay outside the Strait of Hormuz. Its strategic value is a function of what it avoids.

Every serious analysis of Hormuz closure scenarios eventually arrives at the same question: how much oil can get out without using the strait? The answer, consistently, is not enough — and understanding why requires examining the bypass infrastructure that exists, the infrastructure that has been proposed, and the fundamental mismatch between pipeline capacity and the volumes the strait normally moves.

The numbers establish the problem. On a normal day, somewhere between 17 and 21 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products transit Hormuz. The combined nameplate capacity of all existing bypass pipelines is a fraction of that figure, and nameplate capacity is not operational capacity. The infrastructure must be maintained, staffed, protected, and in some cases reversed from its normal flow direction before it becomes useful in a closure scenario. The gap between what the strait moves and what the alternatives can handle does not close quickly.