Global Oil & NGL Pipelines

What the map argues

Pipelines are the bypass, and the leverage

Most oil moves by sea: the EIA estimates about 76 percent of world petroleum supply travelled by water at some point in early 2025, which is why the chokepoints carry the risk premium. The Strait of Hormuz moved 20.9 million b/d in the first half of 2025, about a fifth of global consumption and a quarter of seaborne oil; Malacca, the largest chokepoint, moved 23.2 million b/d^[2]. The pipelines on this map are, among other things, the only structural answer to that exposure.

The answer is thinner than the lines suggest. The two working Hormuz bypasses, Saudi Arabia's East–West line (5 million b/d nameplate) and the UAE's ADCOP to Fujairah (1.8 million b/d), hold only about 2.6 million b/d of actually available spare capacity between them, roughly an eighth of what the strait carries^[2,3]. Nameplate capacity is the number in press releases; spare capacity is the number that matters in a closure.

And a pipeline concentrates leverage as much as it relieves it. The Caspian Pipeline Consortium line carries the large majority of Kazakhstan's oil exports (the consortium says over two-thirds, newswires over 80 percent) across Russian territory to one Black Sea terminal; in 2025 alone it was cut 30–40 percent by a drone strike on a pumping station, throttled by a Russian regulator's mooring suspensions, and hit again at the terminal in November^[4,5,6]. Druzhba tells the same story as politics: its southern branch's repair and restart in April 2026 moved together with Hungary and Slovakia lifting their veto on the EU's Ukraine loan, and days later Russia announced the end of Kazakh transit to Germany's Schwedt refinery, closing the last northern-branch flow^[7,8].

◐ inferred Read the map with both hands, then: solid lines reduce chokepoint exposure only to the extent of their spare capacity, and every line that crosses a third country trades marine risk for political risk. Where a route has neither slack nor an alternative, that is where a disruption becomes a price event.