As the United States-Israeli war on Iran enters its fourth week this weekend, pressure on oil and gas markets continues to mount due to severe disruption to shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz as well as attacks on and around key energy facilities in the Gulf.In peacetime, 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas is shipped from producers in the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz – the only route to the open ocean – including 20 million barrels of oil per day.To bridge the shortage its closure has caused, countries in the Middle East are exploring alternative routes to get energy exports out.In this explainer, we look at three major pipelines in the Middle East that producers may be pinning their hopes on, and whether they can fill the gap.What has happened in the Strait of Hormuz?On March 2 – two days after the US and Israel began strikes on Iran – Ebrahim Jabari, a senior adviser to the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), announced that the strait was “closed”. If any vessels tried to pass through, he said, the IRGC and the navy would “set those ships ablaze”. Since then, traffic through the strait has plunged by more than 95 percent.Iranian officials have most recently stated that the strait is not completely closed – except to ships belonging to the US, Israel and those who collaborate with them – but have also laid down new ground rules. Any vess …
