Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Energy announced on Sunday that the country's East-West oil pipeline has been fully restored to its capacity of approximately seven million barrels per day, following attacks that had significantly disrupted output. The ministry attributed the swift recovery to the operational resilience of Saudi Aramco, the kingdom's state-run oil and gas giant, saying the repair reflected "high crisis management efficiency" and would support the reliability of both local and global energy supplies.
The pipeline, which runs from the Abqaiq oilfield in Saudi Arabia's eastern oil-producing heartland to the Red Sea port city of Yanbu, had seen its pumping capacity reduced by around 700,000 barrels per day following the attacks. The Manifa offshore oilfield, located in the Arabian Gulf off Saudi Arabia's eastern coast, has also been restored to its full capacity of roughly 300,000 barrels per day. However, work is still ongoing at the inland Khurais oilfield, where 300,000 barrels per day of capacity remains offline. Authorities said an announcement would be made once that restoration is complete. No party has been formally blamed for the attacks.
The East-West pipeline has taken on heightened strategic importance since Iran's effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz — a narrow waterway between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas normally flows. The strait has been largely blocked since the United States and Israel launched military operations against Iran at the end of February, causing a sharp spike in global energy prices and stranding hundreds of tankers in the Gulf. A fragile ceasefire between Washington and Tehran took effect on Tuesday, but shipping through the strait remains drastically reduced: only 22 vessels with their tracking systems active exited between Wednesday and Friday, compared with around 135 daily transits before the conflict, according to data from S&P Global.
Some movement is resuming. Three supertankers — each capable of carrying up to two million barrels of crude — exited the strait on Saturday using a route that bypasses Iran's Larak Island, shipping data from the London Stock Exchange Group showed. Among them was the Serifos, chartered by Thailand's state energy firm PTT and carrying Saudi and Emirati crude loaded in early March. Two Chinese-chartered vessels, the Cospearl Lake and He Rong Hai, both operated by Unipec, the trading arm of Chinese energy major Sinopec, also transited the waterway. Hundreds of tankers remain anchored in the Gulf, awaiting further clearances during the two-week truce window.
The restoration of Saudi Arabia's pipeline infrastructure matters well beyond the kingdom's borders. With the Hormuz route still effectively paralysed, the East-West pipeline represents one of the few alternative arteries capable of moving large volumes of Gulf crude to international markets. Analysts and energy markets are closely watching whether the ceasefire will hold long enough to allow the broader backlog of tankers to clear, or whether further disruptions will deepen what is already one of the most severe energy supply shocks in recent years.