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OPINION:
It pays to have a backup plan. Exhibit A: Saudi Arabia’s Petroline, which has blunted Iran’s efforts to menace energy shipments out of the Persian Gulf by threatening attacks in the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s goal is to create an intolerable surge in energy prices that will force President Trump to stop U.S. military attacks on Iran, but because of prudent pipeline investments on the Arabian Peninsula to bypass the strait, about half the oil and gas that normally comes out of the Gulf is still flowing.
America should take note. Petroline demonstrates the need for the robust, redundant energy infrastructure we don’t have — yet.
In the early 1980s, as Saudi Arabia developed its modern energy infrastructure, the Iran-Iraq War raged nearby. The Persian Gulf became a hunting ground for oil tankers as each side sought to inflict maximum damage on the other.
During the previous decade, the world, including the United States, had been put on notice as to how dependent everyone was on the flow of oil out of the Gulf through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, which Iran controlled, as it does now.
Unwilling to place its vital industry at the mercy of a known hostile actor, Saudi Aramco embarked on the ambitious project to establish a pipeline between its enormous oil processing plant at Abqaiq on the Persian Gulf and Yanbu on the Red Sea north of Jeddah, with a companion pipeline to transport natural gas liquids.
While still moving the bulk of its oil by tanker, Petroline remained in use and was regularly upgraded and expanded until its capacity reached 5 million barrels per day.
Maintaining Petroline seemed prudent, particularly after the September 2019 direct Iranian attack on Abqaiq demonstrated Tehran’s willingness to take military action against civilian energy infrastructure.
This prudence paid off this month when Aramco CEO Amin Nasser announced that Petroline had surged to 7 million barrels a day, or a little more than one-third of what normally moves out of the Gulf daily.
Of course, Petroline can’t make up for all the oil being bottled up by the Strait of Hormuz, but the supply has mitigated Iran’s attempt to hold the world’s energy supply hostage. Tankers are surging to the Red Sea, where they do risk attack from the Yemeni Houthis threatening that waterway’s chokepoint at Bab el-Mandeb, but they have been able to pass so far.
Once at Yanbu, they can safely proceed up the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean to deliver their cargoes in Europe.
Petroline is bolstered by other Arabian pipelines, such as the United Arab Emirates’ Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline, completed in 2012. This pipeline can move about 1 million barrels a day to the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz. It can potentially surge to as much as 1.8 million barrels a day if needed.
Although Petroline and the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline have been excellent stopgaps against Iranian aggression, they also should serve as a motivator to expand this critical infrastructure to take this blackmail tool from Iran. The proposed India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, for example, should be modified and accelerated.
Given recent events, the corridor should pivot from the proposed climate-driven focus on green hydrogen transport to an expanded pipeline for natural gas across the Arabian Peninsula to Israel, across the Mediterranean to Greece. If such a facility had been in place at the beginning of the Iran war, then Qatar might not have had to shut down its natural gas production facilities, which would have been extremely disruptive to global markets even after the war.
America also needs to heed the lesson of Petroline and invest in its own robust and redundant energy infrastructure to ensure we can fuel ourselves and supply our plentiful energy resources to partners and allies.
In recent years, hostile activism and legal challenges to pipeline projects from climate extremist groups such as the Sierra Club, Appalachian Voices and the Southern Environmental Law Center have dampened interest in new projects. The Biden administration’s 2022 greenhouse gas considerations for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had a chilling effect on even the expansion of existing infrastructure, to say nothing of the initiation of new pipelines.
Although President Trump alleviated these considerations by terminating them last year, the administration should redouble its already strong efforts in permitting and regulation reform to increase our resilience against natural and man-made disasters that could disrupt the domestic free flow of oil and natural gas.
Projects from Texas’ oil Western Gateway Pipeline to Pennsylvania’s natural gas Appalachian Reliability Project should be fast-tracked to protect and preserve America’s energy security here at home.
It’s better to build this capacity now, before we need it.
• Victoria Coates is vice president of The Heritage Foundation’s Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy.
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