The East-West line to Yanbu is breaking down, and with it the kingdom’s last reliable route around Hormuz

When the Strait of Hormuz closed at the end of February, Saudi Arabia had what almost no other Gulf producer had: a way out at scale. The East-West pipeline, known in the industry as Petroline, carries crude 1,200 kilometers across the desert from the oil fields of the Eastern Province to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Its maximum capacity is about 7 million barrels a day. For seven months it has been the reason the world could still count on Saudi oil. That lifeline is now failing.

How the system works

Karl Miller has just mapped the network, and his work makes clear why the pipeline is so vulnerable. Oil does not simply flow from a well into a pipe. It is lifted from wells across the great fields, Ghawar, Khurais, Shaybah and the rest, and sent through gathering lines to gas-oil separation plants, where oil, gas and water are separated. It then moves to Abqaiq, the stabilization hub at the center of the system, which has 18 crude stabilization units. Only then does it enter the East-West corridor.

The pipeline itself depends on 11 mainline pumping stations that push the crude across the country, plus two separate pressure-relief stations that protect the line but add no pumping power. At Yanbu the crude goes into storage, to refineries and onto tankers. Every link has to work. As Miller puts it, a pipeline is a connected system of pressure, power and controls, and Yanbu can stop loading without a single bomb hitting the port if the crude stops arriving.

Four stations down

That is what is now happening. I can confirm that four of the pipeline’s thirteen stations are out of service. A drone strike on September 11 knocked the line largely out of action for weeks; Riyadh blamed Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. Repairs had only partly restored flows when, on October 4, a strike hit the pumping station at Khurais, east of Riyadh, for the first time, and the line stopped again. No one has claimed that attack.

Miller cautions that you cannot simply divide stations into capacity: losing a third of the stations does not mean losing exactly a third of the flow. What matters is where the damaged stations sit, what bypasses exist, and how much pressure the remaining pumps can sustain. But a pipeline that has lost several of its pumping stations cannot run anywhere near its rated capacity, and the replacement pumps, turbines and transformers are custom-built equipment with long lead times. Using a throughput benchmark of 5.8 million barrels a day, Miller calculates that a complete interruption of the corridor would put 40.6 million barrels of crude movement at risk in a week and 174 million in a month.

The pipeline is under pressure at both ends. On the Red Sea side, Ansar Allah has seized islands at the mouth of the Red Sea, including Perim inside the Bab al-Mandab, and in July declared a “maritime ban” on Saudi shipping. Product tankers leaving Yanbu and Rabigh for Asia and East Africa now have to turn north through Suez, adding nearly a month to their voyages. So even the barrels that reach Yanbu are slower and costlier to sell.

What Iran did

The damage to the wider Saudi system has come in two separate campaigns, and it is worth keeping them distinct. Iran’s strikes came in the first weeks of the war, in March and April, and hit the Gulf coast and the export outlets. The 550,000-barrel-a-day Ras Tanura refinery was shut for about a week. Yanbu’s loadings were briefly halted, and a drone came down at the SAMREF refinery in Yanbu. In April the 460,000-barrel-a-day SATORP refinery and petrochemical complex at Jubail halted units, the Riyadh refinery was hit, fires at the Ju’aymah gas plant disrupted LPG and natural gas liquids exports, and production capacity was cut by about 300,000 barrels a day at each of Manifa and Khurais. Shaybah was targeted repeatedly. Public reporting did not always name the attacker for every spring strike, but they came during Iran’s campaign and followed its pattern: the coast, the processing hubs, the exits.

What Ansar Allah has done

Ansar Allah’s campaign began later, has lasted longer and keeps moving north. In August it struck Aramco’s Jizan refinery, which caught fire on August 9, and claimed an attack in Najran. On September 7 and 8 it hit Aramco sites in Jizan, Najran and Abha, halting operations and wounding 73 people. On October 3 it claimed a strike on an Aramco facility south of Riyadh. Then on October 10 it struck Ghawar, the largest conventional oil field in the world. I have independently confirmed that Ghawar was hit. Riyadh has said nothing about damage. A movement that began this war firing at targets near the Yemeni border has now reached the source of the oil that feeds the pipeline, more than 1,000 kilometers away.

Put the two campaigns together and the picture is stark. Iran damaged the Gulf coast refineries and processing plants; Ansar Allah is attacking the fields in the interior and controls the sea lane at the far end of the corridor; and the pipeline in between has lost four of its thirteen stations. Saudi Arabia is losing its Gulf exit, its Red Sea exit and the line that connects them.

The economic damage

The cost is already showing. In the second quarter Saudi oil activity fell 24.7% from a year earlier and the economy shrank 4.8%, its worst quarter since the pandemic. Oil exports were worth about $212 billion in 2025, roughly 17% of GDP, and oil revenue pays for the Saudi state and much of what is counted as the non-oil economy.

[Table]
Measure | Scale
East-West pipeline | 4 of 13 stations out; rated capacity about 7 million b/d
Full corridor stoppage (Miller) | 40.6 million barrels at risk per week; 174 million per month
Each 1 million b/d of exports lost | About $30–33 billion a year at $80–90 oil
Manifa and Khurais capacity cuts (spring) | About 600,000 b/d; roughly $20 billion a year at $90 oil
Ghawar | On the order of 3.8 million b/d of capacity exposed
Gulf reconstruction (Miller) | $550 billion to $2.28 trillion over seven to ten years
[/Table]

Revenue estimates are my calculations. Field and pipeline capacities are approximate.

Miller’s latest assessment puts the cost of rebuilding the damaged Gulf energy system at $550 billion to $2.28 trillion over seven to ten years. That covers the whole region, but Saudi Arabia will be competing with Qatar, Kuwait, the Emirates and Iraq for the same manufacturers, engineers and crews. Pumping stations are not repaired with spare parts from a warehouse.

For the rest of the world, the East-West pipeline was the insurance policy. As long as it worked, Saudi crude could reach market whatever happened in Hormuz. With four of its thirteen stations out, Ghawar hit and the Red Sea contested, that policy has lapsed. The global shortage of diesel and jet fuel will deepen, and Saudi Arabia, the supplier of last resort, is now fighting to protect its own economy rather than rescue anyone else’s.

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Here’s my chat with Scott Horton from last Friday:

I shot down the Iranian warning that it will invade Gulf countries:

While talking with Nima, Ansar Allah hit ARAMCO:

I had a great chat on Monday with Ian Proud:

Turns out the internet service in China sucks. Still, Ryan and I soldiered on while Sulaiman tried to stay connected:

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