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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/business/iran-war-hormuz-oil.html
Gulf Oil Giants Are Spending Billions to Build Ways around Strait of Hormuz
(New York Times) Lisa Friedman - Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains greatly curtailed because of the war in Iran. Much of the oil getting through the strait is on tankers navigating a treacherous gantlet of Iranian attack drones, or running dark with their location devices turned off. Gulf countries are now intent on breaking their dependence on the narrow waterway. They are building or expanding pipelines and other infrastructure that can bypass it, and vastly expanding storage capacity in places like Asia. These endeavors will cost billions of dollars and take years to complete, but companies and governments recognize that relying too heavily on a single transit route is a risk they can no longer afford to take. In Fujairah, a UAE port city facing the Gulf of Oman, construction crews are working around the clock to lay a secondary crude line parallel to an existing pipeline, aiming to double the country's bypass capacity to 3.6 million barrels per day. In Saudi Arabia, the state oil giant, Aramco, is accelerating a multibillion-dollar expansion of its 1,200-km. East-West Pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu.