Saudi East-West Pipeline: Route, Capacity and Can It Bypass Hormuz?

It is the backbone of Saudi Arabia’s escape route from the Gulf, built and run by the state oil company Saudi Aramco. The East-West Pipeline, also called Petroline, starts at Abqaiq in the Eastern Province, where crude from the big Gulf-side fields is processed, and crosses the desert westward to Yanbu, on the Red Sea coast north of Jeddah. It runs entirely inside Saudi territory.

The system is two parallel pipes, one 56 inches and one 48 inches across, moved along by a chain of 11 pumping stations. A separate line for natural gas liquids runs beside it. At Yanbu the crude either goes to export terminals on the Red Sea or into the refineries of Yanbu Industrial City, which Aramco runs with ExxonMobil and with China’s Sinopec.

Saudi Arabia built it to keep its oil moving if the Gulf was ever closed. The line opened in 1981, a year after the Iran-Iraq war began, and was expanded during the “tanker war” of the late 1980s, when both sides attacked shipping in the Gulf. By the early 1990s it could carry 5 million barrels a day.

It was not the kingdom’s first attempt to go around the Gulf. The Trans-Arabian Pipeline, known as Tapline, was finished in 1950 and carried Saudi crude across Jordan and Syria to Sidon in Lebanon. War in Lebanon cut it off, and it stopped pumping to the Mediterranean in the early 1980s, just as the East-West line took over the job of a Gulf bypass.

Up to about 7 million barrels a day, though it rarely carries that much. Its design capacity was 5 million barrels a day for decades; Aramco raised it to 7 million, partly by converting lines built for gas liquids to carry crude, an expansion it first announced in 2019. Before this war it ran well below capacity, carrying about 2 million to 2.8 million barrels a day, much of it for the Red Sea refineries.

The war changed that. Aramco’s chief executive, Amin Nasser, said on March 10, 2026, that the line would reach its full 7 million barrels a day within days, with about 2 million going to west-coast refineries and about 5 million left for export. After a strike on a pumping station in April, the Energy Ministry said full pumping capacity of about 7 million barrels a day was restored on April 12. After the September shutdown, Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said flows had recovered to 5.8 million barrels a day by October 6.

Riyadh now wants more. The energy minister said on October 12 that capacity could reach 10 million barrels a day within two to three years, and Aramco said with its third-quarter results in early November that preliminary engineering for the 10 million barrel expansion had begun.

Only in part. Saudi Arabia exported about 7.3 million barrels of crude a day in February 2026, the month the war began, and only about 800,000 barrels a day of that left from Yanbu; the rest went through Hormuz. The pipeline can deliver 7 million barrels a day to the west coast, but the bottleneck is at the other end: Yanbu’s crude terminals are rated at roughly 4.5 million barrels a day, and the local refineries take about 2 million barrels a day of the flow. Even at full stretch, the Red Sea route can replace only about 60 percent of the kingdom’s normal crude exports.

Ship-tracking data show how close it has come. Loadings at Yanbu were under 1 million barrels a day in January and February, rose to about 4 million by mid-March and were running at about 4.5 million before the September attack. They then stopped altogether and did not resume until about September 22.

Saudi Arabia is not alone. The United Arab Emirates has a 1.5 million to 1.8 million barrel a day pipeline from its Habshan fields to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the Saudi and Emirati lines together could move about 4.7 million barrels a day around Hormuz. Against the roughly 20.9 million barrels a day that crossed the strait in the first half of 2025, that is less than a quarter. Our explainer Why Is the Strait of Hormuz Important? sets out the rest of the traffic that has no way around.

The Red Sea brings its own risk. Tankers leaving Yanbu for Asia must still pass the Bab el-Mandeb strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, off Yemen, where the Houthis have attacked shipping since 2023, and Houthi missiles now reach Yanbu itself.

It is open as of November 10, 2026, but it has been attacked again and again. The first attack came on May 14, 2019, when armed drones hit pumping stations 8 and 9 at Dawadmi and Afif; Saudi Arabia blamed the Houthis, and Aramco shut the line briefly as a precaution.

In 2026 the attacks became routine. An attack on a pumping station on April 8 and 9 cut throughput by about 700,000 barrels a day for several days, the Energy Ministry said. On September 10 drones struck the line in the Riyadh and Medina regions; Riyadh said they were launched from Iraq, Aramco shut the pipeline on September 11, and Yanbu loadings stopped until about September 22. On October 4 the Houthis claimed missile and drone strikes on Aramco sites in Riyadh and at Khurais, and later in October they claimed drone strikes on pumping stations, which we covered in What Did the Houthis Hit?; Saudi Arabia confirmed none of those claims. The November 9 attack near Medina is the first hit on the line Riyadh has confirmed since September, and the Energy Ministry named no attacker.

Pumping stations are the weak point. A hole in the pipe can be patched in days, but a damaged station takes longer to repair, and while it is down the line cannot push its full volume to the coast.