The top executives of some of the biggest Gulf oil-producing companies called for external investments into new routes to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and create and expand crude and fuel storage capacity outside the region and closer to consumers.
“While the Kingdom is capable and confident, and its systems are coping, no country should face this alone,” Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser said at the 2026 Energy Intelligence Forum in London this week.
“Every attack comes with a global price: weaker energy security, greater market disruption, lives and livelihoods on the line,” Nasser said.
“That is why oil and gas infrastructure is not a cost to be minimized or avoided; it is a collective necessity for producers and consumers alike.”
Kuwait, for its part, is in discussions with European partners to have more refined petroleum products stored closer to consumers in Europe, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) chief executive Sheikh Nawaf Saud Al-Sabah, said at the same event.
“We want to be in that position where we’re providing you the distillates and you also need to make those logistical investments ready so that we can store,” Sheikh Al-Sabah said, as carried by Bloomberg.
Since the war began at the end of February and Iran moved to close the Strait of Hormuz, oil producers in the Persian Gulf have scrambled to move supply out of the region via alternative routes. They have also started using inventive ways to transit the Strait of Hormuz, with shuttle-shipping crude oil on smaller tankers outside the Strait offshore Fujairah or Oman and then onto large carriers en route to the end-buyers.
After the war began, Saudi Arabia quickly redirected most crude oil flows to the Red Sea, via the East-West pipeline, but the infrastructure was attacked with drones last month and was shut down for two weeks for repairs of damaged pumping stations.
Kuwait is intensifying efforts to set up storage sites outside the region, while Iraq, another major Gulf producer, is considering reviving an old defunct pipeline to Syria to ship crude oil from the Iraqi fields to Syria’s Mediterranean coast, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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