[ivell]

I think the price can only increase. There is not much competition for Hormuz. If it is exorbitant now, it can only be more expensive later on. The demand for oil is not going to go down drastically for quite a few years.

If there was another route, the oil would have found the way.

[thatguy0900]

In time pipelines can be made, no? 2 million per ship already gives a lot of room for exorbitant infrastructure projects to break even in the medium term

[1attice]

Pipelines take years, even decades, at least here in Canada. You'd be surprised at how many billions of dollars and person-years of labour you need to get the thing turned on.

Five years at 2mil per ship will make Iran rich.

[rhubarbtree]

There are already pipelines in the region.

[pas]

pipelines, railway, etc.

had the US had any real plan to empower the Gulf states against Iran there would already be backup routes

[Tostino]

Pipelines are incredibly vulnerable to being taken offline by an inexpensive long-range strike. You can't just put them in the middle of a war zone, especially when we (the US) have targeted that same type of infrastructure first.

[citrin_ru]

Pipelines are usually buried under the ground. Pumping statins could be protected by short range SAM systems. An undegraund pipeline can be destroyed by a heavy glide bomd (not an option for Iran) but should be relatively safe from shahed drones. Iran's ballistic rockets are not precise enough to hit a pipeline wihtout spending multiple rockets (in which case it would be cheaper to repair the pipeline than to produce all these rockets).

[pas]

sure, as the oil wells and the pumping stations and everything not underground, but right now there's not even an option to try. (also loss of a pipe section compared to the loss of a tanker is much better economically, easy to replace, not to mention that there's no loss of life, so ultimately it can bear more risk even if there's an active conflict.)

[mrguyorama]

None of those have near the capacity to replace what was flowing through the Straight and will not replace the Straight for a long time. That's the whole problem.

If there were viable alternatives to the Straight, the US would have attacked Iran decades ago. Every US administration has had people in the wings desperate to "Fix" the Iran situation, but only Trump was stupid enough to try it.

Meanwhile, the actual production is meaningfully damaged, and for at least a couple years.

This is an energy crisis.