I’m looking at the map about the strait of hormuz, I’ve looked up what made it so important and I still don’t get it. I thought that the reason there is so much conflict over it, was that I assumed it looked like it was a very integral passageway for ships to get in and out of. But looking at the map again, it only goes straight to into Kuwait.
What am I missing here? Couldn’t the ships just, not bother with that part and route through elsewhere?
The Persian Gulf is where most of the oil is. The only way in or out of the Persian Gulf is through the strait.
a lot of oil comes from the persian gulf. that is hard to get out otherwise. saudi arabia has a pipeline to their westcoast, but that wouldn’t meet the demand.
the strait of hormuz is a major choke point in oil trade. unfortunately oil is stil a key ressource for everything. …
helium, fertilizer and some stuff for making pcbs (yes your motherboards gonna get expensive)
LNG too.
Because the infrastructure in this region is a joke, while oligarchs suck trillions out of the ground to distribute to princes, no one wanted to invest in an alternative pipeline to the Red Sea. Seemed like a city for Douchebags was a better idea. Abu douchebag.
well redundancies are first of all expensive. plus there are already alternate ways of distribution. these are just insufficient for a naval blockade. the capacity of pumping it up and then putting it on a ship quasi-on-site is always gonna be magnitudes bigger and cheaper, than building pipelines. so …
The Encyclopedia Britannica has a great article covering this exact question:
https://www.britannica.com/place/Strait-of-Hormuz
Long story short, the strait is not just the only access point to Kuwait, but also a chokepoint to almost all of Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and so on.
There is of course the Red Sea, that too allows sea access to some of the countries mentioned above, but that features its own chokepoint strait, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. That strait is already a conflict zone because of the Houthi conflict. It’s also closer to Israel, and it’s partly under Iran’s control too.
And there’s too little infrastructure on that side to divert enough oil from the countries in question compared to the Hormuz side.
Looking for the alternate name for the Bab el-Mandeb Strait (the Gate of Grief), sent me looking for other strategic “choke” points.
Aljazeera came through with the first one that was descriptive and visually informative, though they skipped the Strait of Magellan, probably because it’s not a shipping lane for oil. Published this year.
Something like 20% of the world’s oil is produced on the other side of Hormuz.
To be fair, there’s the Red Sea on the other side, that connects a lot of the oil-producing countries to the sea too.
If you could magically teleport oil from one side of the country to the other for free, you might as well just teleport it straight to its buyer and not bother with ships at all. And Iraq and Kuwait, which are major oil producers you might remember from past hits like Gulf War 1 and Gulf War 2, don’t even have another side of the country to send it to.
Its very likely if the war enters a new phase the red sea will be closed by Iran/Houthis anyway.
It’s a lot of land, and a lot of oil. Just because it’s the same country doesn’t make it easy
Kuwait.
What am I missing here?All the other countries LOL
So the important thing to remember is the sheer quantity of oil that needs to be moved and where it needs to be moved to. The Strait of Hormuz in 2024 had 20 million barrels of oil passing through it daily. That’s 840,000,000 gallons or 3,160,000 cubic meters, or ~1300 Olympic swimming pools each day that need to be moved. It also mostly is going to end up getting moved across oceans to be delivered to the people who need it
Moving that much liquid by means other than boats is very difficult. Building pipelines that can move that much liquid is difficult and prone to problems. Especially considering the very harsh climate surrounding the area and even if you do have a pipeline it’s likely still going to end up in a ship because it has to cross an ocean anyway. Moving it by truck is almost logistically impossible, and trains have more problems than pipelines
In order to have the ships big enough to move that liquid you need ports that are deep enough AND already have the infrastructure to handle ships of that size, of which all are already in the Strait. It also made sense because a lot of oil producing countries were in this area so having lots of ships in the area built efficiency
So a whole bunch of confounding factors led to the Strait being the optimal place to move a lot of oil by ship (which the oil needed to go into anyway), however a natural choke point makes this a strategic position for countries in the area. Oil ships are slow, easy targets, and most countries could pretty cheaply take them out. Which adds to the tension in the region
This Wendover Productions video does a good job explaining why so much oil had to go through the Strait
What about aeroplanes
Edit: sorry, this was a joke
Welcome to Lemmy
You seem to have no idea how much oil is shipped every day.
Airplanes are very time efficient but not very fuel efficient. A modern 737 cargo plane holds about 52,000 lbs of cargo. To transport 3 million barrels of oil (not even 20% of the total oil we’re talking about) by plane would take about 20,000 flights daily and there are only about 13,000 737s on the planet. So ignoring the astronomical cost it would take making the process impossible to profit from, you’d have to commandeer the world’s supply of planes to do so. Also I’m almost certain that the entire middle east couldn’t handle 20,000 fully loaded cargo flights every day. It’s simply too much for their airports to handle, even if humans stopped flying
Liquid is heavy. Just comparing freight weight capacity, a 777 can carry around 100 tons, while a large freight ship carries 200,000 tons. That’s a container ship, not an oil freighter, but you see the difference. We move things that can’t take weeks to ship on a plane and pay more for it, while boat shipping is cheap if you can wait for it. And for oil there (usually) is a long queue of ships coming and going, so it doesn’t matter about the time.
Just fly 2,000 777’s
Boeing hasn’t built that many yet since it first became available.
Sounds like a demand problem
Yeah, they’re 2500 orders behind.
No, there is no other way for ships to get out of the Persian Gulf.
Just use aeroplanes instead
Two answers to this question:
- No, Israel and the Arabs hate Iran and would never allow it
- Yes, via Pakistan. Iran already had this contingency plan in place with Pakistan, but it’s taking some time to implement.
