Hormuz Is Disrupted. Now Saudi Arabia's Red Sea Oil Route Faces a New Threat

Iran-backed Houthi forces seized the southwestern Yemeni port city of Mocha this week, then pushed further down the Red Sea coast toward strategic islands near the mouth of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, according to Yemeni government, Iranian and regional sources cited by Reuters. The advance, six months into the wider war between Iran and the United States, tightens Houthi control over a waterway that has become increasingly important to Saudi Arabia's efforts to keep oil moving after disruption at Hormuz -- precisely as the Strait of Hormuz is running at its lowest traffic levels of the war.

The question this raises for the region is not whether the Middle East's energy trade is under strain -- it plainly is -- but whether it is now exposed at both of its main chokepoints at once, with no reliable route left in reserve. The available shipping and pricing data supports real concern about that scenario, but does not yet support the conclusion that it has arrived.

Start with Hormuz, where the damage is least ambiguous. Iran said this week it had attacked ten ships near the strait, and the United States said it had sunk five Iranian oil tankers, among the sharpest single exchanges since the war began. Vessel transits through Hormuz fell to seven on Wednesday, down from 12 the day before and well under the ten-day average of 14, according to preliminary Kpler ship-tracking data reported by Reuters. A seafarer was killed when the Gibraltar-flagged tanker Hercules Star was hit at anchorage off Dubai, and a separate drone strike hit a tanker carrying roughly two million barrels of Iraqi fuel oil. Rystad Energy's chief economist, Claudio Galimberti, told Reuters that flows through the strait -- which normally carries about a fifth of the world's oil and gas -- had reached 8 million to 9 million barrels a day in the week before fighting resumed on August 30, but have since fallen below 2 million bpd. Brent crude settled at $101.21 a barrel on Wednesday, up 3.4%, its highest close since May 22; WTI settled at $96.05, up 3.25%.

Saudi Arabia's answer to Hormuz risk has been Yanbu, its Red Sea export terminal, which draws crude westward across the kingdom by pipeline rather than south through the Gulf. Aramco says the pipeline can carry up to 7 million barrels a day from the Eastern Province, with roughly 2 million bpd normally supplying domestic refineries on the west coast and about 5 million bpd available for export -- a figure for pipeline capacity, not a guarantee of how much crude is actually being loaded and delivered to customers. That workaround is the centerpiece of Saudi Arabia's strategy for keeping oil flowing while the Gulf war continues -- and it is also the reason Yanbu, not just Hormuz, now matters to anyone assessing the kingdom's real export capacity.

Yanbu itself is a way of avoiding both chokepoints for the oil moving to the coast: the pipeline carries crude overland, so it bypasses Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb alike before a barrel is ever loaded onto a tanker. The exposure appears afterward. Crude bound north, for European refiners, can move through the Suez Canal and the SUMED pipeline without touching the southern Red Sea at all. But cargoes bound for Asian buyers -- Saudi Arabia's largest export market -- normally have to sail south through Bab el-Mandeb, which is exactly where the Houthis have been escalating. Saudi Arabia gets its oil to Yanbu without Hormuz; getting it from Yanbu to Asia is what still exposes Saudi cargoes to Bab el-Mandeb. Reuters reported that Yanbu's crude and condensate loadings fell to a six-month low in August amid intensifying Houthi attacks near the strait -- though the two main data providers do not agree on the scale of either the low or the recovery since. Vortexa put loadings at 3.2 million bpd in August, rising to 3.7 million bpd in September; Kpler's estimates are lower across both months, at 1.5 million bpd in August and 2.9 million bpd in September. Both firms agree loadings have improved this month; they disagree by nearly a factor of two on the August floor and by roughly 800,000 bpd on where things stand now -- a gap that should be read as a range, not a single number.

Mocha itself sits on Yemen's Red Sea coast, a geography that has made it a staging point for Houthi operations against shipping in the strait well before this week. Reuters reported that the advance that took the city came with direct guidance from Iran's Revolutionary Guards, according to Yemeni government, Iranian and regional sources; Yemeni military sources further alleged the campaign was being directed by a named Guards officer, a claim Iranian sources did not confirm. Iran, for its part, publicly denies giving the Houthis military direction, describing them as an ally rather than a proxy; one Iranian official told Reuters the Mocha operation was a Houthi decision, though it had incidentally helped Tehran by pushing oil prices higher and pressuring the United States and Saudi Arabia. Ahmed Nagi, a Yemen analyst at the International Crisis Group, called the seizure "a significant milestone." Saudi Arabia, notably, has so far limited its military response to logistics and narrower air strikes on northern battlefronts rather than a major push to retake the coast, an emphasis regional officials attributed to Riyadh's reluctance to invite heavier Houthi drone strikes on Saudi territory.

None of that amounts to Bab el-Mandeb being closed. On the same Wednesday that Hormuz traffic fell to single digits, 28 commodity vessels transited Bab el-Mandeb -- in line with, not below, its ten-day average of 27, according to Kpler data reported by Reuters. That does not describe a strait under blockade; it describes one operating close to its recent norm even as the surrounding security situation worsens. Separate data has shown Saudi Arabia's own tanker fleet occasionally rerouting entirely around Africa to avoid the strait, as Bahri did with six VLCCs in late July, but the strait has continued to function as a transit route throughout -- a materially different condition from Hormuz's near-total shutdown to commodity shipping this week.

That contrast is the honest way to describe where things stand: Hormuz has suffered an acute, largely physical disruption, with transits down to single digits and Iran and the United States trading direct strikes on tankers; Bab el-Mandeb has suffered a rise in strategic and insurance risk without yet suffering a comparable collapse in throughput. The Houthis' capture of Mocha increases their capacity to threaten the second route without having yet closed it.

Three scenarios are worth weighing. In the low case, Hormuz traffic stabilizes at reduced but functioning levels, Bab el-Mandeb continues operating near its ten-day average, and Yanbu loadings keep the modest recovery both Vortexa and Kpler now show. In the medium case, Houthi forces consolidate around Mocha without seizing further territory, sustaining elevated insurance costs and periodic vessel diversions that raise costs without closing the strait outright. In the high case, Houthi forces advance further toward the strait's narrowest point or escalate attacks on tankers approaching Yanbu, at which point Saudi Arabia would face degraded access to both of its major export corridors at once -- a scenario the Mocha operation moves toward but has not yet reached.

For Qatar and its Gulf neighbors, the immediate exposure remains concentrated at Hormuz, through which Qatari LNG cargoes continue to transit. But the Yanbu story is a reminder that Gulf energy security no longer rests on a single chokepoint calculation -- it now depends on how many alternate routes the region's producers have left, and how many of those routes can come under pressure at the same time.