Saudi Aramco processes more oil through fewer facilities than any other company on earth. The Abqaiq oil processing facility in the Eastern Province handles a majority of Saudi crude production, stabilizing and processing it before it moves to export terminals. Ras Tanura is the largest oil loading port in the world. These facilities — concentrated, critical, and heavily defended — represent the upstream end of a supply chain whose downstream end runs through Hormuz. An attack on Abqaiq or a closure of the strait produces the same downstream effect: Saudi crude stops reaching its buyers. The two risks are linked by geography even when they originate from different threats.

Pakistan sits at the northeastern corner of the Arabian Sea, flanked by Iran to its west and with a coastline that extends from the Gulf of Oman toward India. It is the world’s only nuclear-armed Muslim-majority state, a country with deep financial and demographic ties to the Gulf Arab states, and a country with a 900-kilometer land border with Iran. Its position makes it relevant to every major regional security scenario, including Hormuz, without giving it decisive influence over any of them. Pakistan is courted and pressured simultaneously by parties whose interests in the Gulf are incompatible, and it manages this position with a hedging strategy that satisfies no one and infuriates everyone.

Global oil markets operate with a margin of production capacity that is not currently being used. This spare capacity — oil wells that are drilled and capable of producing but are held back to manage price levels within OPEC+ target ranges — is the primary buffer that the market can deploy in response to supply disruptions. The overwhelming majority of it sits in the Gulf. In the event of a Hormuz closure, that spare capacity would be simultaneously the most valuable resource in global energy markets and the one most completely inaccessible, because the wells that hold it are connected to export terminals that require the strait to reach their buyers.

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.

The March 2023 agreement restoring Saudi-Iranian diplomatic relations, brokered in Beijing over four days of talks that surprised most Western analysts by the speed and apparent completeness of their outcome, was described at the time as a potential transformation of Gulf security dynamics. The more accurate framing is that it was a managed reduction in operational hostility between two states whose fundamental interests remain incompatible and whose competition for regional influence has been paused, not resolved. The strait has been somewhat quieter since the agreement. The conditions that make it dangerous have not changed.