Aramco Says Oil Disruptions Last Days, Not Months, as It Weighs New Routes

Amin Nasser, chief executive of Saudi Aramco, said interruptions to the company's oil operations can typically be resolved in days rather than weeks, and that the producer is weighing two more export corridors on top of the routes it already uses. He spoke in Tokyo, where he was meeting the company's customers in Japan.

Aramco's three main export paths include the Strait of Hormuz. Nasser said the company is examining two further options and is studying bigger overseas storage capacity, naming Japan among the locations under consideration.

The company is working with the ministry that oversees the sector and with partners in Japan on adding storage there, he said, and is carrying out engineering and feasibility studies for the additional routes.

Pipeline redundancy

Nasser pointed to the East-West pipeline as an example of how Aramco builds slack into its network. The link is not a single line, he said, but several, which makes it difficult to take all of them out at once. That redundancy, in his account, is what allows Aramco to keep supplying buyers when parts of the system go down.

The 1,200-kilometre East-West system moves crude from fields in the country's east to an export facility in the west. It has become an important alternative for Asian buyers who want to avoid the Strait of Hormuz.

Strikes earlier this month hit the pipeline and paused operations temporarily, pushing Brent to the $108 a barrel level. Nasser declined to give an update on the line itself. He said interruptions, when they happen, tend to last days rather than weeks or months, on every occasion he has seen.

More than two ways out

The conventional view holds that Aramco has two outlets for its crude: the Strait of Hormuz or the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Nasser said the company can also move barrels through Egypt's Sumed pipeline, a 320-kilometre link running from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. The combination, he said, gives Aramco enough options to meet customer demand.

The company's record includes the 2019 drone attack on its processing facilities, the largest it has absorbed, after which it returned to full operation within 11 days. Nasser took the top job in 2015 and ranks first on a 2026 list of the region's 100 chief executives.

A worsening market

His reading of the wider market was bleak. The crisis is not improving, he said, and it will get worse because the interruption is significant rather than minor.

Two factors have concealed how serious the disruption is, he argued: the emergency release of reserves by the International Energy Agency, and China's decision to cut oil imports. Both are temporary and cannot be sustained, he said.

In March 2026, the IEA's 32 member countries agreed unanimously to make 400 million barrels available from emergency stockpiles to address market disruption caused by the conflict in the Middle East. It was the agency's largest release of oil reserves on record.