Transcription
On February 28th, the United States and Israel struck Iran. "We are going to destroy their missiles and raise their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally again obliterated."
Within days, the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which 20% of the world's oil travels every day, was closed. What happened next was not a surprise. The world knew this choke point was fragile. It knew what a closure would cost. It had the plans, the proposals, and in some cases, the money to do something about it. It just never did. The question was never whether this would happen. The question was always whether anything would be ready when it did.
Pull up the map. The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow neck of water connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. Iran sits to the north. The Musandam Peninsula, shared by Oman and the UAE, sits to the south. At its narrowest point, it is 21 miles wide. The two usable shipping lanes, one inbound, one outbound, are each barely 2 miles across, separated by a 2-mile buffer zone. That is all the space the global energy system has to work with.
Every drop of oil produced in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE has to exit through this single passage. The oil is produced inside the Gulf. So if the exit is blocked, unlike Panama, where ships can reroute around South America, there is no alternative path for a tanker already loaded in Basra or Q8 city.
The numbers tell you what that means. 20 million barrels of oil pass through here every single day. Around 20% of all global liquefied natural gas trade flows through here as well, almost entirely from Qatar. China gets roughly 40% of its oil this way. Japan, South Korea, and India are in the same position. Every major Asian economy, along with Europe's growing liquefied natural gas importers, depend on this passage for its energy supply.
The Panama Canal handles about 5% of world trade. Hormuz is not a trade route. It is the world's primary energy artery. They're not comparable choke points. Nothing else in global trade comes close. And right now, over 150 tankers sit anchored just outside it, unable to move, waiting after Iran's Revolutionary Guard warned that any vessel attempting to pass would be set ablaze.
"Attention all ships. Attention all ships. From now on, all navigating through the Strait of Hormuz is forbidden."
This is the passage the world never built a real backup for. This crisis has a history, and understanding it explains why the world is scrambling right now. Go back to the 1980s. During the Iran-Iraq war, both sides attacked oil tankers in what became known as the tanker war. Lloyd's of London estimated 546 commercial vessels were damaged. The world got its first real look at what a Hormuz crisis felt like and responded by building the one bypass that exists today: Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, constructed in 1981 specifically because planners feared this exact scenario. That pipeline is now over 40 years old, and it remains the best answer the world has.
Fast forward to late 2011 and into 2012. Iran threatened to close the strait in response to Western nuclear sanctions. The UAE rushed to complete its Habshan-Fujairah pipeline. Multiple canal proposals resurfaced, were studied, and were shelved. When the threat faded, every time Iran threatens, the proposals return. Every time the threat fades, they go back in the drawer. These are not new ideas, and most of them are decades old. What is new is the urgency.
The most dramatic proposal ever seriously studied came in 2008 when Dubai officials were actively exploring a canal roughly 180 km long, cutting from the Gulf Coast across the Hajar mountains to the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, bypassing the strait completely. The engineering challenge is enormous. The Hajar Mountains reach elevations above 2,300 ft, which means you would need a lock system comparable to the Panama Canal, massive excavation through solid mountain rock, and entirely new port infrastructure at both ends. The cost estimate: $200 billion. For context, the entire Panama Canal expansion cost $5 billion, making this proposal 40 times more expensive. The UAE ultimately chose to build the Abu Dhabi crude oil pipeline instead. Same destination and a fraction of the cost. The canal was shelved but never formally abandoned, and it is being actively discussed again today.
In 2015, the Arab Center for Studies in Riyadh proposed something even further reaching. A 950 km canal stretching from the Persian Gulf all the way across the Arabian Peninsula to the Red Sea. The proposed dimensions were massive, nearly 500 ft wide and over 80 ft deep, large enough to handle fully loaded supertankers. It would cross terrain reaching over 2,300 ft above sea level, requiring a lock system spanning the full width of a country. Estimated cost: $80 billion. Saudi Arabia was briefly receptive. The proposal never progressed beyond the study phase, and it is now back in circulation.
In 2024, waterways engineers published the most detailed engineering study ever done on this problem, laying out three distinct canal routes. Option one: a canal across Oman's Musandam Peninsula, the narrow finger of land that juts directly into the strait. Shorter route but extremely complex terrain. Option two: a canal entirely within UAE territory, running from the Gulf Coast to Fujairah, positioned about 75 miles from the strait itself. The engineers concluded this was technically feasible, comparing its complexity to Dubai's Palm Jumeirah artificial island project. This is the most credible canal concept ever formally put on paper. Option three makes everything else look modest. The Mesopotamian Multimodal Maritime Canal, a 1,500 km waterway connecting the Mediterranean Sea directly to the Persian Gulf. For scale, the Suez Canal is 193 km, and Panama is 82. This would be the longest artificial waterway ever built by an enormous margin, and the engineers treat it seriously as a generational geopolitical solution. None have been funded. All three are being actively discussed right now.
Approved at the Gulf Cooperation Council summit in 2009, the Gulf Railway is a 2,177 km rail network connecting all six Gulf states: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman. Estimated cost: $250 billion. Projected freight capacity: 201 million tons per year. It has missed every single deadline. 2018 came and went, then 2021. The network now nominally targets 2030, with large sections still unbuilt. The critical limitation for the Hormuz problem: rail can move containers and manufactured goods efficiently, but it cannot move crude oil at the volumes Hormuz carries. The Gulf Railway solves the non-energy trade problem while leaving the oil crisis completely untouched.
Iraq is in genuine financial emergency. Crude oil is 90% of its state revenue, and almost all of it flows through Hormuz. Three long-idle routes are being urgently revived. The Iraq-Jordan Aqaba corridor stretches approximately 1,665 km from Basra to Jordan's Red Sea port. Proposed since 2012, agreed to in principle and never built, it is now being treated as a national survival project with an estimated cost of under $9 billion. The Kirkuk-Ceyhan route is an existing pipeline north to Turkey's Mediterranean coast, suspended when the conflict escalated. The Iraq-Syria Banias pipeline is an 850 km dormant route to Syria's Mediterranean coast. Dead for decades, but now politically viable following the fall of Assad's government. Together, these routes could handle only a fraction of Iraq's normal export volume, making them a lifeline, but not a solution.
Of everything in this video, only two systems are actually running. Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, the "Pro-Line," runs approximately 746 miles from the Gulf Coast to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Saudi Aramco's CEO announced on March 10th that the system was being ramped to its full emergency capacity of 7 million barrels per day. Conversion was confirmed complete on March 11th, up from roughly 2 million barrels per day before the crisis. There is, however, a bottleneck almost nobody is talking about. The Yanbu export terminal has a combined loading capacity of approximately 4 to 4 1/2 million barrels per day, according to Argus Media. So even if the pipeline runs flat out at 7 million barrels, the port caps what actually gets onto ships at roughly two-thirds of that figure.
The UAE's Habshan-Fujairah pipeline has a standard capacity of 1.5 million barrels per day, extendable to 1.8 million in an emergency. Iran has already struck the Fujairah terminal, putting the entire route at risk. Even combining both pipelines at their maximum real export capacity, the world can move approximately 6 million barrels per day around the strait, leaving a gap of 12 to 14 million with no answer on the horizon.
And there is one final problem that rarely gets mentioned. Any tanker leaving Yanbu heading to Asia still has to pass through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, another choke point 600 miles to the south, where Houthi forces had already spent 2 years attacking commercial shipping before this conflict started. By the time Aramco got the East-West pipeline running at full capacity, the Houthi movement had already declared military alignment with Iran and put the Red Sea route on notice on the very first day of the conflict. The bypass was not even operational before its escape route was already under threat. That is not a coincidence. The two choke points are tied to the same conflict, backed by the same alliance, and there is no third exit. The world's best Hormuz bypass empties directly into the only war zone worse than the one it was built to avoid.
The Strait of Hormuz was never just a shipping lane. It was an assumption that the exit from the world's largest oil basin would always be open. Every proposal in this video existed because someone somewhere understood exactly how fragile that assumption was. The studies were done. The engineers drew the plans. In some cases, the funding was within reach. What decades of proposals, studies, and summits actually produced was two pipelines that cannot cover the gap, pointed at a sea that is now also under attack. The world kept betting this fragility would never be tested at both choke points simultaneously. It was.
Of all the projects covered here, the mega canals, the railways, the land corridors, which one do you think actually gets built now that the crisis is real? Drop your answer in the comments. Thank you for watching. And if you enjoyed, make sure to subscribe for more Mega Build stories.