Roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz each day, and a new Chatham House analysis argues that emerging energy and trade routes could bypass the chokepoint and redraw commercial geography across the Middle East. The report's authors are careful to separate viable infrastructure from proposals still sitting at the appraisal stage.

The study points to existing and planned pipeline capacity that moves Gulf crude to terminals on the Arabian Peninsula's outside coast, avoiding tanker transit through Hormuz. The East-West pipeline across Saudi Arabia and the UAE's Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline, which terminates at Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, already give exporters physical alternatives when tension closes or constricts the strait. Chatham House treats these as the backbone of any bypass architecture.

Beyond sanctioned, operating infrastructure, the report surveys a wider set of corridors that remain speculative. These include overland trade routes linking the Gulf to Mediterranean and Asian markets and new energy transit schemes that would carry hydrogen and electricity rather than crude and products. The authors attribute feasibility questions to financing, cross-border politics and construction timelines, and they decline to treat any unsanctioned route as a near-term supply factor.

Chatham House frames the strategic stakes in hard numbers of dependence. A large share of seaborne liquefied natural gas from Qatar and significant volumes of crude from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and the UAE must still transit Hormuz, so any bypass capacity matters to price formation only at the margin until new routes reach final investment decision and construction.

The analysis notes that diverting trade would carry economic consequences for Gulf states themselves. Ports and storage hubs inside the Gulf, from Jebel Ali to Ras Tanura, derive revenue and strategic weight from chokepoint traffic; shifting flows to outside terminals redistributes that value rather than eliminating the region's exposure to disruption.

Geography sets its own constraints. The report highlights terrain, water availability and the sheer capital cost of overland corridors as persistent obstacles. Regional rivalries complicate routing decisions, since corridors that benefit one state can disadvantage another, and the study presents this political economy as analysis rather than prediction.

Chatham House also examines how new energy carriers could change the calculus over the longer term. Hydrogen pipelines and high-voltage interconnectors would not move hydrocarbon molecules through the strait at all, but the authors place these options decades out, dependent on demand growth and technology costs that remain unproven at scale.

The watch item: whether any of the unsanctioned bypass corridors reaches final investment decision, and how much additional outside-Gulf pipeline and storage capacity Gulf producers commit to before the next Hormuz disruption tests the system.