Saudi Arabia’s energy minister has said that oil pumped through the key East-West Pipeline reached a capacity of 5.8 million barrels a day (bpd). Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman made the comments during a panel discussion at the GCC 2026 Forum in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, on Tuesday. The 1,200km (750-mile) pipeline links Saudi Arabia’s major oil-producing fields in the east with the Red Sea port of Yanbu, allowing the kingdom to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, which has largely been closed since the outbreak of the US-Israel war on Iran in late February.
The Saudi Ministry of Energy had said at the time of the attack in early September that pipeline had been temporarily shut as a “precaution”. Specialised teams had begun steps to “secure the pipeline and assess its safety”, according to the ministry. The East-West pipeline, which is also known as the Petroline, was built in 1981.
It has a maximum capacity of 7 million bpd, although actual flows have been lower in recent months – about 2 million bpd in August, according to commodities data and analytics firm Kpler – the lowest monthly level since January, as attacks by Yemen’s Houthi group made the Red Sea route difficult to use. Since the US-Israeli war on Iran disrupted oil flows from Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbours through the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia has been using the pipeline to reroute some 4 million bpd, equivalent to about 4 percent of global supply, to Yanbu.
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