Report · Shipping & chokepoints · Oil markets
Saudi Crude Rerouting to Yanbu After the Hormuz Disruption
Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline offers an alternative to Hormuz, but cannot replace all the lost flow. The report assesses the limits at Yanbu and the risks transferred to the Red Sea.
Co-authored with Abraham Went.
Full report: 4-minute read.
Summary
When shipping through the Strait of Hormuz was disrupted, Saudi Arabia rerouted crude across the country by pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. Loadings there rose to 1.9 million barrels a day in the first five days of March 2026, from 1.1 million in February. That increase must be set against the scale of the disruption: Saudi Arabia exports more than 7 million barrels a day, of which roughly 6 million usually move through Hormuz, and Yanbu rarely loads more than 2.5 million.
The workaround offers partial relief while moving some risk westward to the Red Sea corridor, where freight and insurance costs had risen sharply.
Key findings
The binding constraint is at the export end: storage, berths, tanker availability and loading capacity, not the pipeline alone.
The shape of the futures curve pointed to a front-end supply shock. Reuters described a backwardation of roughly US$10 between front-month and six-month Brent.
Heavy crude prices in the Americas, Europe and Africa rose to multi-year highs as refiners looked for substitutes for Middle Eastern sour grades.
Read the full report for the complete analysis.
Read the full report at 6:05 MarketsDated analysis from 29 March 2026. Views reflect the information available at the time and have not been updated. Nothing here is investment advice.