Analysis — the chain that leads from a blocked strait to a drone over an Egyptian port, and why the routes that carry the workaround traffic keep becoming the next target.
The chain, link by link
Nothing in this article requires a prediction. Every link is dated and on the record.
Hormuz was blocked first. The strait that carried roughly a fifth of globally traded oil and LNG before the war has run at single digits for weeks. On Thursday it recorded two vessels — both tankers, both in ballast, both entering the Gulf. The first flicker of the directional recovery signal we have been watching, at a scale that underlines how little is moving.
So Saudi barrels went west. The East–West pipeline to Yanbu — the designated Hormuz bypass — took the load. Then the war followed it: the Houthis declared a blockade of Saudi shipping, struck at Jizan and Yanbu, and this week the ~400,000 b/d Jizan refinery's shutdown was confirmed. Correlated risk became correlated loss, as our bypass analysis anticipated.
So tankers turned north. With Bab el-Mandeb hostile — improved to 25 crossings on Thursday, but under a standing blockade threat, with a toll regime under consideration and ships running dark — displaced crude has leaned on the Suez Canal and the SUMED pipeline. Kpler data cited by Reuters on 30 July showed Saudi crude loadings from SUMED's Mediterranean outlet at Sidi Kerir at 28.79 million barrels for July, up from 19.52 million in April — about 1.4 mb/d lifted in the prior week against a historical weekly peak of 2.1 mb/d and SUMED capacity of 2.5 mb/d, with roughly ten VLCCs expected to load in the coming weeks.
And this week the threat appeared there too. On Wednesday a drone struck two gas vessels at Egypt's Damietta port. No group has credibly claimed it, and the Suez Canal itself has not been attacked or closed — both points matter and we state them plainly. But the incident landed precisely where the displaced traffic now concentrates. Saul Kavonic, head of energy research at MST Marquee, told Reuters that as much as 5 million b/d of oil supply currently able to bypass Hormuz could be put at risk if the Red Sea/Suez route were also compromised.
Meanwhile, in a different war entirely, Kazakhstan's CPC route — about 2% of world crude supply — suspended loadings again on Thursday after another tanker drone attack, its second interruption in a week.
No single event has to close the world's oil system. The alternatives simply become progressively fewer, longer and more expensive.
Why the detours keep getting hit
There is a mechanism here, and it is worth naming, because it is the compound-cascade logic in its purest form.
A detour works because it is peripheral — a secondary route carrying secondary volumes. The moment a primary route fails, that changes. Displaced flow concentrates onto the alternative, and its throughput, economic importance and consequence-if-hit rise together. The traffic paints the target — economically, even if not militarily. Every successful workaround redirects more barrels, more ships and more strategic weight onto a smaller number of surviving corridors; the redundancy that solves yesterday's disruption increases the consequence of tomorrow's.
The concentration is already visible in the reported data: Sidi Kerir loadings rising, around 30 ships clustered off Port Said against about 20 earlier in the week, and Vortexa recording a clear increase in northbound crude and condensate tankers. And be precise about what is not established: no one has claimed the Damietta strike, Reuters reports no direct threat has been made against the Suez Canal, and S&P Global notes the market is not yet pricing a canal disruption. Whether anyone is actually aiming at the concentration is unknown — and this argument does not need it. The point is consequence, not intent. Hormuz's closure made Yanbu matter; Yanbu's exposure made Bab el-Mandeb matter; Bab el-Mandeb's hostility made SUMED matter. Wherever the load sits is where the next incident — deliberate or accidental — does the most damage.
A detour that everyone uses stops being a detour. It becomes the route — and inherits everything that made the route worth worrying about.
The remaining alternatives, and what each one costs
Set out what is actually left, and the price of each:
Suez/SUMED — the workhorse. It adds capacity limits and a dependence: the corridor runs through one country's infrastructure, and its security is now doing load-bearing work for the whole displaced system. It is open, functioning, and — as of this week — probed.
The Cape of Good Hope — always available, and priced in time: roughly 50 days from Yanbu to Asia against 16 through Bab el-Mandeb. The first Cape fixtures in years have already appeared. This detour cannot be attacked, but it taxes every voyage roughly three extra weeks of ships, fuel and capital — a permanent toll paid in distance.
The Northern Sea Route — the only corridor whose risks genuinely do not correlate with the Gulf: its constraints are ice, season and sanctions. It is being used, at scale, by the one producer positioned to use it — Russia, with seven tankers staged and the first conventional LNG carrier of the year at Arctic LNG 2 — and now sampled by others: South Korea's first NSR container service loads at Busan on 22 August, explicitly citing Suez-route uncertainty. But it is open a few months a year, and it is not the West's detour to command.
Storage moved outside the trap — the quietest adaptation. ADNOC has bought five VLCCs for about $590 million and chartered around 25 tankers, roughly 15 of them reportedly shuttling crude from inside Hormuz to storage at Fujairah and Oman — pre-positioning barrels on the seaward side of the chokepoint so that sales no longer depend on a daily transit. QatarEnergy's 33 US spot LNG cargoes — against four in all of last year — are the same move in another commodity: when your own route is compromised, buy access to someone else's production on the safe side of the map.
Notice what every one of these has in common: none of them adds supply. They spend money, time, or dependence to move the same barrels by harder paths. The detour economy is a cost layer, not a source.
What "running out" actually means
The claim is not that the system fails. Oil is still moving; Bab el-Mandeb improved this week; Hormuz recorded its first inbound ballast tankers; the Suez Canal is open. Anyone describing the map as closed is overstating it, and the transit numbers — which are minimums, given how many ships now run dark — still describe flow, not blockage.
The claim is about convexity. Losing the first route does not merely subtract its capacity: it pushes traffic onto the alternatives, which become busier, more valuable and harder to replace — so a subsequent disruption does disproportionately more damage than the first. A drone at Damietta in April would have been a local story; this week it shadows a corridor doing duty for two blocked straits. The CPC suspension would once have been absorbed by Gulf flexibility; now it lands on a system with none to spare. The insurance market is already behaving this way: Dryad Global's Corey Ranslem told Reuters that an attack anywhere in the canal region would substantially alter security assessments and war-risk premiums, and Kpler's Matthew Wright notes a Suez disruption would reach prices almost immediately through longer voyages and freight costs — perceived threat alone, Argus expects, is enough to lift premiums. Flexibility is a buffer, and buffers are what this crisis has been spending all along — inventories first, then spare refining capacity, and now spare geography.
That is also why the market's behaviour makes sense. Crude eased on Friday even as product cracks set records: the barrels are finding ways through, at a price — and the price increasingly lives in the products and the logistics rather than the crude itself. Commercial buyers are voting the same way: India's MRPL has tendered, for the first time, for a cargo that avoids Hormuz and the Red Sea. That is what planning for detour depletion looks like from inside a refinery.
What would confirm this — and what would break it
It confirms if the Damietta incident is followed by attributed attacks on Suez or SUMED infrastructure, if war-risk premiums extend to the northern Red Sea or the Egyptian Mediterranean, or if a second unattributed incident lands on the same corridor — a pattern needs two points.
It breaks if a durable settlement reopens Hormuz to normal traffic, at which point the whole displaced load drains off the detour network and each route reverts to obscurity. That remains entirely possible; the diplomatic track is active even as the strikes resume. The detour problem is downstream of the war, and only the war's end truly solves it.
Until one of those happens, the honest description is this: the world's oil map still works, but almost every route on it is now doing a job it was not designed for, at a cost it did not used to carry, under a threat it did not used to attract. The system has not run out of ways to move oil.
It is running out of ways that are safe, short and cheap — and those were the only three things a detour was ever for.
EuroOilWatch / UKOilWatch / AmericasOilWatch track fuel reserves, prices and supply-route risk across Europe, Britain and the Americas. This piece is analysis, not a price forecast; confirmed facts are stated as confirmed and unverified reports are flagged as such.