Petroline

The Petroline, formally the East-West Crude Oil Pipeline, is Saudi Arabia's 1,200-kilometre overland crude pipeline running from the Eastern Province oilfields to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, restored to its 7 million barrel-a-day design capacity on 12 April 2026. By late July 2026, Yanbu was handling 92% of Saudi seaborne crude exports, shipping roughly 3.75 million barrels a day of crude and condensate, with 62% bound for India, Japan, China and South Korea , confirming the pipeline's shift from an emergency Hormuz bypass into Saudi Arabia's primary export corridor to Asia.

Built by Saudi Aramco and commissioned in 1981 as a wartime hedge during the Iran-Iraq War, when Hormuz tanker traffic came under fire, Petroline was expanded to its current 7 mbpd capacity in subsequent decades and has emergency pumping capacity beyond that under surge conditions. A parallel products pipeline, the IPSA Petroline, runs the same corridor. Petroline's role as the original Hormuz bypass is the direct precedent for the ADCOP-Fujairah system the UAE built along the same logic, called into full operation by the same 2026 threat pattern .

Petroline's residual vulnerability is the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, where Ansar Allah retains threat capability against Red Sea shipping; crude exported via Yanbu still traverses the Red Sea before reaching European or Asian markets. Analysts including Mona Yacoubian at CSIS warned during the blockade that Houthi engagement on Red Sea shipping remained a real risk . The redirection of most Yanbu-loaded barrels toward Asian buyers rather than Europe means the pipeline has changed not just Saudi Arabia's export routing but its trading partners.