Saudi Arabia started shipping its oil through an Egyptian port called Sidi Kerir in July 2026 because its usual route got blocked. The new path is longer and more expensive.

Here's why. Houthi fighters, backed by Iran, shut down a narrow strip of sea called the Bab al-Mandeb strait. That strait sits at the southern end of the Red Sea and is one of the key routes oil tankers use. When the Houthis attacked a vessel in the Red Sea, tankers turned around and headed for Egypt instead. Saudi Aramco, the national oil company, then offered extra oil shipments from Sidi Kerir.

The route works like this. Oil gets pumped through a pipeline called SUMED, which carries crude from the Red Sea coast across Egypt to the Mediterranean. From the Sidi Kerir terminal there, the oil is loaded onto ships, mostly heading to European refineries. Some Saudi crude also reaches the Mediterranean on tankers small enough to fit through the Suez Canal without needing the pipeline.

Either way, the trip costs more. Fuel costs for oil tankers taking the Suez Canal route roughly doubled to about $2.87 million per journey.

The Houthis didn't just shut the strait. They also announced a blockade of Saudi ports. At least four tankers carrying Saudi oil turned around before reaching the strait. Saudi crude loadings — the amount of oil actually being loaded onto ships — were cut roughly in half after the attacks, according to Kpler, a company that tracks oil shipments.

This came on top of a separate problem. Since March 2026, Saudi Arabia had already been rerouting oil to the Red Sea to avoid the Strait of Hormuz, another narrow waterway between Iran and Oman that carries a huge share of the world's oil. Reuters reported on March 3, 2026 that Aramco was shifting some exports to the Red Sea for that reason. Bloomberg followed up on March 13, 2026 with a report describing a growing fleet of oil supertankers waiting off Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast. The key port was Yanbu, where a large number of tankers sat waiting to pick up oil by mid-March.

Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline — which carries oil from the kingdom's eastern oil fields to its Red Sea coast — can move up to 2 million barrels of oil per day. Bloomberg described it in March 2026 as a vital release valve for global oil supplies, especially as the Trump administration threatened Iran over the Strait of Hormuz. A Baker Institute working paper published in April 2026 found that Saudi Arabia and the UAE had backup options for exporting oil if Hormuz were blocked.

Since March 2026, Saudi Arabia has exported about 5 million barrels per day from its west coast — more than double prewar levels. As of July 2026, the kingdom was considering expanding the East-West pipeline's capacity beyond that 2 million barrel per day limit.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that Saudi oil moving through the Suez Canal and SUMED pipeline dropped about 10% during the disruption. Increased exports through the East-West pipeline and Red Sea ports partially made up for it. Saudi Aramco said in its Q1 2026 webcast that the market lost about a billion barrels of oil, partly offset by oil flowing through these alternative routes.

Aramco's maximum sustainable capacity — the most oil it can produce for an extended time — is 12.0 million barrels per day, according to its 2025 Annual Report. A new project called Marjan, expected to start in 2025, adds another 300,000 barrels per day.

The broader context here is that Saudi Arabia has a chokepoint problem on top of a chokepoint problem. The kingdom first rerouted oil west to escape Hormuz. Then its new route came under attack from the Houthis. Each reroute adds cost and difficulty. The Sidi Kerir detour keeps oil flowing to Europe, but the higher shipping and operating costs eat into the money Saudi Arabia actually makes on each barrel.

The fact that Saudi Arabia is thinking about expanding the East-West pipeline suggests Riyadh — the Saudi government — thinks 2 million barrels per day is not enough to handle a situation where both chokepoints are squeezed at once. The big question for oil markets is whether the 5 million barrels per day flowing from the west coast since March can keep going if the Bab al-Mandeb stays shut. The halving of Saudi loadings after the Houthi attacks shows the system is fragile. The 10% drop in Suez and SUMED volumes, partly made up by pipeline throughput, shows the system is handling the stress but straining under it.

In terms of what this means for global oil supply, Aramco's billion-barrel supply loss figure shows how big the disruption has been. Saudi Arabia's 12.0 million barrel per day capacity and the extra 300,000 from Marjan give the kingdom room to produce more, but having the capacity to produce oil does not help if you cannot ship it. The cost structure has shifted. A $2.87 million fuel bill per Suez journey is a real, direct cost. Saudi Arabia is absorbing the burden of keeping its oil flowing through a route that is longer, more expensive, and more vulnerable than the one it replaced.