Land arteries blocked: The “East-West” pipeline fails to break the Saudi oil blockade

Logistical reports have revealed the failure of the Saudi emergency plan that relied on the “East-West” pipeline to bypass dangerous waterways.

Follow-ups – Al-Khabar Al-Yemeni:

The pipeline’s capacity has proven its field inadequacy to transport more than half of the oil quantities designated for export, leading to the accumulation of huge amounts of crude in the eastern region’s storage tanks without a safe outlet.

The crisis did not stop at the pipeline’s capacity limit but extended to a severe operational bottleneck at Yanbu port itself. The port faced a significant inability to accommodate and dispatch tankers due to shipping lines’ refusal to dock and load at the western berth, turning the alternative discharge point into a point of stagnation and escalating logistical depletion.

This blockage reflects the failure of the Saudi bet on the “land alternative” to mitigate the impact of the blockade, placing export movement before a complex predicament combining limited land infrastructure and paralyzed maritime navigation, threatening to disrupt Aramco’s shipping commitments to global markets.