The $100B Plan to Bypass the World's Most Critical Oil Route

Roughly a fifth of all the oil the world burns has to sail through a stretch of water barely thirty kilometres wide, squeezed between Iran and Oman. For decades, the Gulf's oil producers have quietly built a second option, hundreds of kilometres of desert pipeline engineered so their oil never has to sail past Iran at all. Tens of billions of dollars later, most of the region's oil still has no choice but to transit the strait anyway. This video covers how Saudi Arabia and the UAE built an entire alternative export network across the Arabian Peninsula: the Petroline system running over a thousand kilometres to the Red Sea, the newer Habshan-to-Fujairah pipeline reaching the Gulf of Oman directly, and the decades of desert construction, dune fields, and extreme heat both projects had to survive to move crude oil across dry land instead of dangerous water. We also cover the gap four decades of pipeline investment still hasn't closed. Every pipeline built could only carry a fraction of the region's total output, and liquefied natural gas has no overland alternative at all, meaning that in any real crisis, the overwhelming majority of Gulf energy exports would still have no route to the ocean except straight through Hormuz. Part of an ongoing series on the megaprojects that shouldn't have been possible. Previous entry: the twenty-billion-dollar wall South Korea built across the sea. Next: why Indonesia is building a thirty-two-billion-dollar capital in the jungle. 0:00 Cold open 0:45 The problem 3:00 The solution on paper 6:30 Building it, step by step 15:30 What almost went wrong 21:30 Verdict Link Subscribe now -    / @overbuilt-e9h