Zhenghao New Materials

Six months ago, the business of exporting oil from the Persian Gulf was simple: produce crude at the lowest cost, ship it via the fastest route, and sell it to the highest bidder. But those days are gone. The Strait of Hormuz, long the most vital and convenient chokepoint for Gulf oil exports, has been severely disrupted by the conflict with Iran. Tankers now face the threat of Iranian attack drones, or must sail in "silent" mode with their tracking systems turned off. At least 17 seafarers have lost their lives in the area. Faced with this predicament, the Gulf producers are scrambling to reduce their dependence on this narrow waterway by building or expanding pipelines and other infrastructure that bypass the Strait, while also massively boosting their oil storage capacity in Asia and other regions.

In the UAE, at the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, crews are working around the clock to lay a new crude pipeline parallel to an existing one. The goal is to double the country's bypass capacity to 3.6 million barrels per day, enabling virtually all of Abu Dhabi's onshore crude to be shipped directly to international tankers without passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is accelerating the expansion of its East‑West Pipeline, a 1,201‑km cross‑peninsula line that runs to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. Riyadh plans to boost its capacity by an additional 1 to 2 million barrels per day. Kuwait is in talks with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to build a pipeline linking its oil fields to the Red Sea or to an Omani port; Iraq and Jordan have revived a long‑stalled pipeline project that would carry up to 1 million barrels per day to the Red Sea port of Aqaba. Iraq is also pushing ahead with plans to repair a damaged pipeline that would send crude from its Kirkuk fields to the Mediterranean coast of Syria.

In addition to new pipelines, the Gulf states are expanding storage facilities in South Korea, Japan, India and elsewhere—building a kind of "physical insurance" so that even if the Strait of Hormuz is blocked, oil is already stockpiled on the other side. As Ben Cahill, an energy analyst at the University of Texas at Austin, put it: “Many people believe the Strait of Hormuz will never again carry the same share of oil export traffic as it did before the war. No country in the world wants to be that dependent on this single transit point again.”

For China's domestic chemical additives industry, the impact comes mainly through two channels: oil price volatility and supply‑chain risks. Rising global oil prices push up the cost of petrochemical feedstocks, though a de‑escalation in geopolitical tensions could bring costs back down. At the same time, the disruption at the Strait has already hit Asian petrochemical supply chains, with some companies that rely heavily on Middle Eastern imports facing the risk of shortages or price spikes. The extent of the damage depends largely on each firm's import dependence—those with a high share of Middle Eastern sourcing will see their profit margins squeezed, while companies with high self‑sufficiency and long‑term supply agreements will fare better. In the long run, this crisis will force China's additives sector to accelerate efforts to boost domestic self‑reliance and tilt supply chains toward local sources, in order to strengthen resilience against future geopolitical shocks.