With the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb disrupted, Saudi Arabia’s crude has one last exit: Egypt’s Suez Canal. But the detour is costly: Reuters estimated the longer route adds about $2.5 million in shipping costs per journey to Asia, stretching a typical voyage to Taiwan from 19 to 48 days via Suez, the Mediterranean, and around the Cape of Good Hope.
The Suez Canal is also a bottleneck. Very Large Crude Carriers — the workhorses of Saudi Arabia’s export fleet — are too big to sail through fully laden. Instead, barrels must be offloaded and pumped through Egypt’s Sumed pipeline before being reloaded in the Mediterranean. Israel’s Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline is the other Red Sea-Mediterranean link: In the past, moving Saudi crude through that would have been “unthinkable,” writes Bloomberg’s Javier Blas, but “desperate times may call for desperate measures.”