Middle East supply security and the Strait of Hormuz in a diverted Red Sea year
Middle East oil and gas supply security in 2024 must be described with two straits in view. Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea corridor have already forced tankers and LNG carriers onto the Cape route, cutting oil flows through Bab el-Mandeb to an average of 4.0 million barrels per day in 2024 through August from 8.7 million barrels per day in full-year 2023, according to EIA analysis of Vortexa data. Cape flows rose to 9.2 million barrels per day in the first eight months of 2024 from 6.0 million barrels per day in 2023.
That is a live disruption. The Strait of Hormuz, by contrast, remained the world's primary oil chokepoint, with 2023 oil flows averaging 20.9 million barrels per day, about 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption, and around one-fifth of global LNG trade also transiting Hormuz in 2023. Red Sea risk lengthens voyages between Asia and Europe and raises freight. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq and Iran sit behind Hormuz geography in different ways, with some pipeline bypass options of limited scale relative to seaborne volumes.
Qatar's LNG is particularly exposed in share-of-global-LNG terms because a large fraction of world LNG trade originates in the Gulf. Iranian production and export behaviour under sanctions remains a wild card for balances, even when official OPEC+ math excludes or sidelines those barrels. Saudi output averaged 9.5 million barrels per day of crude and condensate in 2023, with the Kingdom as OPEC's top crude producer and the world's top crude exporter that year, per EIA.
August 2024 sits after months of Red Sea rerouting and amid elevated regional military risk. For firms, the practical response is layered: contractual flexibility where it can be bought at reasonable cost; operational buffers in storage and logistics; and scenario planning that includes corridor disruption and producer-policy shifts as base cases rather than footnotes. Keep Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb on separate lines of the risk register, with separate probability and impact estimates, and revisit both whenever regional escalation ladders change.