Iranian threats to block the waterway crossed by a third of global maritime crude exports have led Arabian Gulf producers to focus on ways to circumvent the bottleneck.
Strategic pipelines - old and new - have received much attention from governments in recent months, but years of neglect have left this mode of transport ill-equipped to cope with a serious disruption in tanker exports.
Tehran has repeatedly threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, a 51km stretch of water that separates the Arabian Peninsula from Iran. This is in response to a fresh round of sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union aimed at crippling oil exports over its nuclear programme.
Iran's sabre-rattling has resonated throughout the global oil market. About 17 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil - about a third of global tanker exports - are routed through the 13km wide shipping lane of the Strait, says Professor Paul Stevens at the London think tank Chatham House.
"Any threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, or actual closure, [is] an existential threat to the West and indeed to the rest of the world economy, at a time when the economy is looking shaky," he said.
US military chiefs have attested to Iran's ability to block the waterway for a limited amount of time. The prospect of oil revenues interrupted and long-term demand sapped by the economic slump that would result are issues.
Initiatives by Abu Dhabi has considerably addressed such concerns. The Chinese contractor CPECC this year completed the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline, designed to carry about 1.8 million bpd of oil from Habshan to the port of Fujairah on the coast.
This is sufficient capacity to enable all of Abu Dhabi's onshore oil production to bypass the Strait. Nevertheless, it is not able to export the entire 2.6 million bpd Abu Dhabi produces.
Neighbouring Saudi Arabia is in a similar predicament. The kingdom took steps to reduce its reliance on the Strait of Hormuz much earlier, completing two parallel pipelines in 1992.
The structures - known as the Petroline - are able to carry more than 3m bpd of crude from the oil-producing regions in the east to the Red Sea coast in the west. But Saudi Arabia started to export most of its crude to Asia, making shipments from the Red Sea time consuming.
As the pipelines fell into disuse, one was converted to transport natural gas to the industrial megacity of Yanbu, which now houses a thriving petrochemicals production base.
As the industry relies on natural gas from the east, the Saudi government is reluctant to refigure the pipeline for crude. Instead, it has quietly revived a third pipeline, which was originally built to give Iraq an outlet during its war with Iran in the 1980s.
The Iraq Pipeline in Saudi Arabia was confiscated by the Saudi government over the non-payment of transit fees in 2001 - which drew an angry response from Iraq - and has since used it to transport gas to the West.
With a capacity of 1.65 million bpd, the pipeline does not address the exports constraints arising from a closed-off Strait and the kingdom would have to sit on the bulk of its 8 million bpd in exports.
Iraq - which Opec estimated produced in excess of 3 million bpd for the first time last month - exports oil to Turkey via the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline.
But it is vulnerable to attacks by Kurdish separatists in Turkey and this month flows were stopped again because of attacks. Most of Iraq's 2.4 million bpd in exports leaves via tankers and insufficient maintenance has more than halved the pipeline's original capacity of 1.6 million bpd.
However, Iran's blustering is unlikely to result in its choking of the Strait, especially after the US has bolstered its military presence in the Gulf. In addition, closing the Strait would deprive it of its last line of defence for the controversial nuclear programme that led to the latest round of sanctions.
"It is unlikely that they will [close it] because the threat of the closure of the Strait is their major deterrent against a military strike against their nuclear facilities," said Mr Stevens.
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