Editor’s Note:
The strategic chokepoint connecting the oil producers of the Gulf to global maritime routes for exported crude, the Strait of Hormuz, is once again the scene of rising tensions. The pressure on Iran over its nuclear enrichment program was ratcheted up on July 1st with expanded trade sanctions, American military force levels — quantity and diversity — are being boosted significantly, and rhetoric is becoming more bellicose as prospects for diplomatic solutions fade. If by design or miscalculation hostilities between Iran and the U.S. and its allies erupt in the Gulf, the Strait is at the top of the list of security concerns. Iran has threatened to close the narrow waterway by force and America has vowed to defend freedom of navigation for the critical traffic that passes through Hormuz.
Today we are pleased to present for your consideration an article by Bryan R. Gibson, writing for The Majalla, as he sheds light on the Iranian threats to block Hormuz in response to the U.S. and European sanctions designed to stop Iran’s nuclear programs or retaliation after military action. Hormuz is the sole direct sea passage for countries of the Persian Gulf exporting petroleum, approximately 20 percent of the world’s oil, 35 percent of seaborne traded oil, passes through it. In an attempt to bypass Iranian interdiction in an earlier era, the Iraqi Pipeline in Saudi Arabia (IPSA) was laid across the kingdom in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war. However, it has not carried crude oil from Iraq since the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein in 1990.
In late June Reuters reported that Saudi Arabia had begun operating and testing the IPSA to reduce the impact on Kingdom from Iranian threats on Hormuz.
“As tensions over Iran’s nuclear program rose, the Saudi government decided to put IPSA on standby to transport more crude west in an emergency. Saudi Arabia has now quietly reconditioned IPSA to carry crude, test pumping along the line over the last four to five months, several sources with knowledge of the project say. ‘The testing started because Saudi Arabia wanted to secure alternative routes to export oil,’ an industry source in Saudi Arabia said. Western industry sources said the tests through the 1.65-million barrel-a-day line had delivered into storage facilities at Mu’ajjiz near Yanbu on the Red Sea for at least four months. The United Arab Emirates has built its own Hormuz bypass pipeline, which is due to start exporting from the Gulf of Oman next month.”
Gibson addresses the relationship between the tougher Iranian nuclear sanctions and the consequences of attempts to close access to the strait of Hormuz. While the Iranian government’s rhetoric and threats to Hormuz maritime traffic become more acute, Gibson states the closing of the strait “would harm Iran just as much as any of the Gulf states,” as it would be “cutting off its own oil exports from its main terminal at Kharg Island.”
SUSRIS thanks our good friends at The Majalla for sharing this insightful article with you.
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The Importance of the Strait of Hormuz – CNN Back|Story – Dec 30, 2011
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Bypassing Hormuz
Bryan R. Gibson | The Majalla
Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz is nothing new, and its neighbors have been preparing for this eventuality for decades. Ever since the 1980s, fears of Iranian action in the strait have led the Gulf states to build pipelines as a hedge against bad times. Now that tensions are rising once more, The Majalla shines a spotlight on their preparations.
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During the Iran-Iraq War, Iran implemented an attrition strategy and a policy of economic strangulation to force Iraq into submission. This led to an Iranian deal with Syria to cut off Iraq’s trans-Syrian pipeline in 1982. Together with the closure of Iraq’s Gulf ports at the start of the war, the closure of the Syrian pipeline meant that if Iraq were to stay financially solvent it had to find a way around the Strait of Hormuz, hurt Iran’s ability to export oil, or both. This led to the so-called ‘Tanker War,’ where each side targeted the other’s shipping in the Gulf, a dramatic rise in shipping insurance rates, and to efforts by Iraq’s allies—including the US—to seek out ways to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Looking at the situation in Gulf today, with Iran threatening once again to close the strait, it has becoming apparent that the Gulf states heeded the lessons of the past and have applied them to the current crisis. Simply put, the Iran-Iraq War taught them that they needed to reduce their reliance on what former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance called “the jugular vein of the West”: the Strait of Hormuz.
Recognizing the threat that the strait’s closure posed, in the early 1980s Saudi Arabia constructed two major pipelines, both over 1,000 km long, from the Eastern province to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. By 1992, after the Gulf War, the Saudis had expanded the pipeline to a capacity of 4.5 million barrels per day (bpd). The purpose was undoubtedly to mitigate against potential threats to the Strait of Hormuz, on which Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states were almost completely reliant. But Saudi Arabia was not alone. As I point out in my book, “Covert Relationship” (Praeger, 2010), during his famous trip to Baghdad in December 1983, Donald Rumsfeld urged the Iraqi regime to agree to build a tie-in line from Iraq’s southern oil facilities outside Basra to Saudi Arabia’s existing Petroline, which consisted of two parallel pipelines running eastward to the Red Sea. Completed in September 1985, this became known as the Iraq Pipeline in Saudi Arabia (IPSA) and was operational until 1990, when Saudi Arabia cut Iraq off in response to its invasion of Kuwait. It was expropriated completely in 2001 as payment for outstanding Iraqi debts. Nevertheless, with the end of the Iran-Iraq War in August 1988, the threat to the Strait of Hormuz subsided—at least until recently.
In late December 2011, amid Israeli threats to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, the Iranian government threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz in the event that Iran was attacked. The situation continued to escalate into January and February, when the European Union agreed to an embargo of Iranian oil and the US froze the assets of Iranian financial institutions and banned international banks from making oil transactions with Iran with the threat of being blacklisted. After a brief period of hope in April and May, when Iran agreed to talks on its nuclear enrichment program, things fell apart and the EU and US sanctions came into effect at the start of this month.
The implementation of the sanctions has raised the stakes for Iran, which is already in dire financial straits. It has also increased the likelihood that the government will close the Strait of Hormuz, though this would harm Iran just as much as any of the Gulf states by cutting off its own oil exports from its main terminal at Kharg Island. But Iran would not suffer alone: if the Strait of Hormuz was actually closed, it would have a devastating impact on the already-struggling global economy. Indeed, as Charles Emerson and Paul Stevens from Chatham House point out, “a sharp oil price spike could tip the global economy into a further slowdown.” The problem is that approximately 17 million bpd pass through the Strait of Hormuz, roughly 32 percent of daily global oil exports. It appears that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the US have long been preparing for this contingency.
Selected Oil and Gas Pipeline Infrastructure in the Middle East (Source: EIA)
At the time of Iran’s renewed threat to close the strait in early 2012, Chatham House estimated that the capacity of the pipelines that bypass the strait was somewhere around 8 million bpd. In the past two weeks, however, Saudi Arabia and the UAE announced separately that a further 3.15 million bpd could still make it onto the market if Iran were to act. On 28 June, Saudi Arabia announced that it had been secretly testing the IPSA for the past four months, to ensure that it could be converted back to transporting oil instead of the natural gas it transports at present. This means that an additional 1.65 million bpd could stay on the market. In addition, in late June the UAE announced that its Harshen-Fujairah pipeline, which began construction in 2008, had come online and would be fully operational by August, allowing an addition 1.5 million bpd to bypass the strait. These two pipelines, combined with the 8 million bpd already bypassing the strait, mean that at least 11.15 million bpd would still be able to bypass this choke point and make it onto the market. The smaller Gulf states, like Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar, as well as Iraq, would be in trouble, but they would not be alone.
Depending on the means with which Iran respond to the new sanctions, it could also starve itself of the meager 1.5 million bpd that it is currently exporting, while the remaining 1 million bpd it is pumping sits in storage on- and offshore. However, the US has made it clear that it will respond aggressively to any Iranian provocation, with the New York Times quoting one US official as saying, “Don’t even think about closing the strait. We’ll clear the mines. Don’t even think about sending your fast boats out to harass our vessels or commercial shipping. We’ll put them on the bottom of the Gulf.” The US has also quietly expanded its military deployment in the Gulf to include a floating military base, which could be used as a stationing point for mine sweeping, and—in a worst-case scenario—military attacks against Iran.
Interestingly, this is a throwback to US operations in the Gulf during 1987-88, which led to direct clashes with the Iranian navy, the sinking of several of its vessels, the destruction of a number of oil platforms, and the mistaken downing of an Iranian passenger plane that killed all 290 passengers on board. The Iranians have not forgotten this, and over the past few days have been rattling sabers in the Gulf. In the end, how the crisis turns out will ultimately boil down to how Tehran decides to act. If it chooses to act aggressively, it will be met with aggression. However, if it chooses a more peaceful route, the West must take a lesson from how it treated the Russians after the fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s and be accommodating toward the regime, while creating opportunities to save face. For the sake of the region, the global economy, and the Iranian people, let us hope the regime chooses a more peaceful path: the consequences of aggression are unpredictable at best.
[Originally published by The Majalla on July 6, 2012. Reprinted with permission.]
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Bryan R. Gibson
Gibson is a contributing writer for The Majalla based in Tunisia, and a PhD candidate in International History at the London School of Economics. He is the also the author of “Covert Relationship: American Foreign Policy, Intelligence and the Iran-Iraq War.”
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About The Majalla
THE MAJALLA offers an array of articles addressing the most important issues facing the Middle East and the world today. From political analysis of developing stories, to debates between world class intellectuals, and interviews of leading political figures, our magazine is dedicated to providing the public with informative analyses of the current events shaping the global order. [Source: The Majalla.com]
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Related Items:
- China Cuts Back Iran Oil Imports – Iran Primer – June 28, 2012
- Saudi Readies Oil Line to Counter Iran Hormuz Threat – Reuters – June 28, 2012
- Saudi Aramco Expands in Oil Trading – SUSTG – June 23, 2012
- Saudi Arabia Achieving $100 Oil Signals Output Reversal – Bloomberg – June 7, 2012
- Analysis: Time Shortage for Asian Buyers of Iranian Oil – Reuters – June 6, 2012
- Oil Sanctions Take Economic Toll – New York Times – May 23, 2012
- Middle Eastern Sea Routes Vital to Future Oil Supply – The National – May 11, 2012
- OPEC Oil Production Climbs to 31.71 Million BPD – Peak Oil – May 11, 2012
- Saudi Arabia Seeks Lower Oil Prices – SUSRIS – April 9, 2012
- Jadwa Special Report: Oil Market Boosts Economic Outlook – SUSRIS – Apr 9, 2012
