As the Strait of Hormuz remains de facto closed for tanker traffic, Saudi Arabia is scrambling to hike its oil exports via the Red Sea route by boosting east-west pipeline flows and accelerating loadings at the Yanbu port on the Red Sea.
Saudi Arabia is rapidly scaling its Red Sea export pivot through Yanbu, with 27 very large crude carriers (VLCCs) heading toward the terminal as export dependency shifts westward, maritime AI company Windward said in its latest daily analysis.
Ports exceptions are rising across the Gulf region, and the disruption is spreading into dry bulk commodities and global industrial supply chains, Windward notes.
Saudi Arabia has pivoted onshore Arab Light volumes onto the 7 million barrels per day (bpd) Petroline from east to Yanbu on its western shores. This has pushed Yanbu’s oil exports to about 2.47 million bpd, a massive 330% surge compared with pre-war levels, according to Windward data.
The Saudi pivot to the Red Sea is already visible in supertanker movements as 27 such vessels are currently observed to be heading toward Yanbu, compared with 18 vessels for Jeddah and three each for Jizan, Duba, and Rabigh.
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“This concentration indicates that Yanbu is now serving as the primary outlet for Petroline-delivered crude and the central node of Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea export workaround,” Windward’s analysts noted.
In a sign of the efforts to maximize Red Sea exports, Saudi Arabia’s oil giant Aramco has reportedly requested from Asian buyers to nominate crude loading plans for April for both its key export port in the Gulf and the export alternative on the Red Sea.
Saudi Arabia can replace a small portion of the lost export option at the Ras Tanura port with loadings from Yanbu, which bypass the Strait of Hormuz.
The East-West pipeline has 7 million bpd capacity on paper, but there is the question about how much can the terminals at Yanbu load, with some estimates putting this capacity at around 3 million bpd, Vortexa said last week.
Prior to the war Aramco was exporting about 6 million bpd via the Strait of Hormuz.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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