EuroOilWatch Analysis — what a convoy of tanker trucks reveals about the scale of the system it is trying to replace.
On the roads between Iraq and the Mediterranean, the global energy system has been reduced to its smallest practical unit.
A tanker truck approaches the Syrian border carrying approximately 20 tonnes of oil — about 135 barrels. It joins a convoy, passes through customs, crosses roads damaged by years of war and continues towards the ports of Baniyas or Tartus.
The journey reportedly takes between four and six days. At the other end, the oil must be unloaded into storage, transferred onto a ship and sent onwards to its eventual buyer.
The operation is real. It is useful. For Iraq, deprived of reliable access through the Strait of Hormuz, it may be economically essential.
But it is not a substitute for a maritime energy system.
It is an illustration of why that system matters.
One truck: 135 barrels
A road tanker carrying 135 barrels sounds substantial. It is more than 21,000 litres of oil — enough to represent a meaningful commercial cargo in almost any ordinary setting.
The problem is that the global oil system does not operate on an ordinary scale.
A Very Large Crude Carrier, or VLCC, can transport roughly 1.9 million to 2.2 million barrels in a single voyage. Using two million barrels as a representative cargo, replacing one ship would require almost 14,815 tanker-truck loads.
That comparison is worth pausing over.
One ship.
Nearly fifteen thousand trucks.
And that is merely the cargo capacity. It does not include the drivers, trailers, fuel, loading terminals, customs posts, road space, maintenance facilities, insurance or security required to make fifteen thousand separate journeys happen.
The ship carries its entire cargo through one port movement.
The trucks must each be loaded, dispatched, driven, inspected, processed at borders, unloaded and returned.
This is the difference between moving oil and moving oil at scale.
What a chokepoint actually carries
In normal conditions, the Strait of Hormuz handles approximately 15 million barrels per day of crude oil, alongside about 5.5 million barrels per day of refined petroleum products — roughly 20 million barrels a day in total. That represents more than a quarter of global seaborne oil trade and about a fifth of global oil consumption.
To replace the crude-oil portion alone with trucks carrying 135 barrels each would require more than 111,000 loaded truck journeys every day.
To replace the combined crude and petroleum-product flow of roughly 20 million barrels per day would require about 148,000 loaded journeys every day.
That is not a fleet. It is a continuous moving city.
And because the drive from Iraq to Mediterranean ports can take four to six days, the number of vehicles simultaneously required on the road would be far greater than the daily departure figure. Every truck sent west must also be unloaded, turned around and driven back before it can carry another 135 barrels.
The arithmetic reveals the true function of a chokepoint.
Hormuz is not important merely because ships happen to pass through it. It is important because a huge system of oilfields, pipelines, storage tanks, loading terminals, ports, ships, insurers and refineries has been built around its ability to move immense volumes continuously.
The narrow waterway is only the most visible part of the machine.
The workaround is important — but its limits matter more
Iraq began expanding overland oil movements after the war sharply disrupted its southern export route through Basra and the Gulf.
Fuel oil has been trucked through Syria since April. Iraq later announced plans to move crude and naphtha through Syrian ports as well, with initial crude volumes intended to begin at around 50,000 barrels per day once loading installations are complete. At 135 barrels per vehicle, even that relatively modest planned flow would require roughly 370 loaded trucks every day.
Syrian officials said Baniyas could unload an average of around 900 tanker trucks daily. At 135 barrels per truck, that represents a theoretical maximum of about 121,500 barrels per day before allowing for differences in cargo type, operational delays or unused capacity.
The flows that have actually materialised give the clearest measure. Iraq's oil ministry estimated that 1 million tonnes of fuel oil were trucked to Syria and Jordan in June, roughly double May's figure — an achievement that turned Syria into the largest fuel-oil exporter in the Middle East, at 28% of regional volumes, from a standing start. On our own arithmetic that is on the order of 200,000 barrels per day.
Set against the roughly 20 million barrels a day that normally moves through Hormuz, it is about one per cent.
That is meaningful for a country trying to prevent storage tanks from filling and oilfields from being shut down.
But compared with Iraq's normal exports, or with the volumes passing through Hormuz, it remains small.
Before the conflict, Iraq exported around 3.6 million barrels per day, with approximately 3.4 million leaving through its southern terminals. The planned 50,000-barrel-per-day Syrian crude route would replace less than 2% of that normal southern flow.
The truck route is therefore not irrelevant.
It is a pressure-release valve.
A pressure-release valve can prevent immediate damage. It cannot replace the main pipeline.
Every truck carries its own infrastructure burden
The visible cargo is oil. The invisible cargo is everything required to move it.
Each tanker truck requires:
- a suitable vehicle and trailer;
- a trained driver;
- diesel fuel;
- tyres and spare parts;
- secure roads;
- border permits;
- customs staff;
- loading pumps;
- unloading facilities;
- accident response;
- insurance;
- protection from theft or attack.
The road itself becomes part of the energy cost.
Moving oil by sea concentrates enormous quantities into a relatively small number of voyages. Moving it by road breaks that cargo into thousands of separate mechanical, administrative and human operations.
Every operation introduces another possible delay.
A tanker ship can be delayed by weather, war, insurance or port congestion. But a road convoy can also be delayed by traffic, bridge limits, border closures, driver shortages, vehicle breakdowns, protests, accidents and damaged infrastructure.
None of this is hypothetical. Roughly half of Syria's roads are damaged. Tanker queues outside Baniyas have stretched beyond 30 kilometres. Drivers have reported fatigue and fatal accidents caused by the absence of rest facilities along the route, and in June an armed attack was reported on a tanker travelling the Aleppo–Manbij road.
This is not a criticism of the people operating it.
It is the unavoidable consequence of substituting a fragmented transport system for a high-density one.
Energy density is not enough
Oil is valuable partly because it is extraordinarily energy dense.
But the physical density of the fuel is only half the story.
Modern civilisation also depends upon logistical density: the ability to move large quantities of energy with relatively little labour, land, time and equipment.
A pipeline achieves logistical density by moving oil continuously through a fixed route.
A supertanker achieves it by carrying up to two million barrels with one vessel and one crew.
A refinery achieves it by processing hundreds of thousands of barrels at one integrated site.
A tanker truck does not possess that economy of scale. It is flexible, mobile and useful — but it moves only 135 barrels at a time.
This matters because cheap energy is not simply energy found cheaply underground.
Cheap energy is energy that can be:
- produced at scale;
- transported at scale;
- refined at scale;
- stored at scale;
- delivered reliably;
- financed and insured at acceptable cost.
Remove any one of those conditions and the oil may still physically exist, but it is no longer available to the economy on the same terms.
The illusion of spare routes
When a maritime chokepoint is disrupted, maps immediately fill with alternatives.
Oil can be sent through Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea.
It can move through the United Arab Emirates to Fujairah.
Iraqi oil can travel north to Turkey or west through Syria.
Cargoes can take longer routes around Africa.
Some oil can travel by rail or road.
Each alternative is real. Together, they create resilience.
But they are not interchangeable with the original route.
The International Energy Agency estimates that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have approximately 3.5 million to 5.5 million barrels per day of available pipeline capacity capable of bypassing Hormuz. That is substantial, but still far below the nearly 15 million barrels per day of crude normally passing through the strait. The IEA also warns that the logistics and supply chains required to re-route substantial flows have not been robustly tested.
A bypass pipeline may have theoretical capacity, yet still encounter constraints at pumping stations, storage terminals or export berths.
A port may be able to load more ships, but not necessarily enough ships, quickly enough.
A road may exist on a map, but not support thousands of heavy tanker movements each day.
Infrastructure capacity is always determined by the narrowest point in the entire chain.
Pipelines cannot be announced into existence
The lesson has not been lost on Iraq or its international partners.
Iraq and Syria are now seeking to restore a pipeline towards the Mediterranean, while Chevron has signed agreements involving investment in another Iraqi export route. The Basra–Haditha network — no longer merely proposed, with $1.5bn allocated in April, construction begun around 1 May and a total cost near $4.6bn — is designed to carry 2.25 million barrels per day, with branches running towards Turkey's Ceyhan terminal, Syria's Baniyas port and Jordan's Aqaba.
That capacity is equivalent to roughly 16,667 tanker trucks every day.
Here the most serious counter-argument deserves a hearing. Goldman Sachs examined nine mostly-Gulf pipeline projects and found a median construction time of about two and a half years — concluding that single-country pipelines get built relatively quickly, faster still when a disruption is driving them. Its projection is that new pipelines could divert 45% of Hormuz oil by 2027 and 60% by 2028.
Take that seriously, and it cuts against the pessimistic reading: the bypass capacity is coming, and sooner than the scale of the problem might suggest.
But it does not rescue the present. A median of two and a half years runs from the day construction starts — and this crisis began in February 2026. Even Goldman's optimistic path leaves the bulk of the diversion arriving in 2027 and 2028, which is no help at all to a refinery whose storage is filling this month. That gap between when the infrastructure is needed and when it can exist is precisely what the convoys are filling.
The lesson is not that pipelines are useless. It is that they must be built before the crisis that requires them.
A pipeline can bypass a chokepoint.
A press release cannot.
Why infrastructure appears excessive — until it is needed
Redundant pipelines, spare port capacity, strategic storage and alternative terminals often appear wasteful during normal periods.
They are expensive. They may operate below capacity. They tie up capital in assets that could remain partly unused for years.
Efficiency-driven thinking therefore tends to ask why they are needed.
The answer becomes obvious only when the main route fails.
Saudi Arabia's East–West pipeline can carry oil from the Gulf side of the kingdom to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Its nominal capacity is around 5 million barrels per day; Aramco pushed it to a record of roughly 7 million in early 2026, but only by converting adjacent natural-gas-liquids lines to carry crude. Even then the pipeline is not the binding constraint — the Yanbu terminal complex can load only about 4.3 to 4.5 million barrels per day.
The chain is exactly as strong as its narrowest link, and here that link is a berth, not a pipe.
The UAE's pipeline to Fujairah performs a similar role, carrying up to around 1.8 million barrels per day to a terminal outside Hormuz.
These systems were not improvised after the strait became unreliable.
They were built beforehand.
Their value lies partly in the fact that they may not be needed every day.
Resilience always looks inefficient until the day efficiency fails.
The cost of energy is the cost of the whole chain
The Iraq–Syria truck convoys provide a concrete illustration of a larger principle.
Oil does not reach consumers because it exists.
It reaches them because an enormous, capital-intensive system continually performs millions of coordinated actions:
wells produce;
pipelines gather;
storage tanks balance supply;
ports load;
ships sail;
insurers cover risk;
banks finance cargoes;
refineries process crude;
trucks distribute products.
The price paid at the petrol station or factory gate contains the cost of that entire system.
When a chokepoint closes, the missing element is not only the stretch of water.
What disappears is the ability to perform the same logistical task at the same speed, volume and cost.
The oil can still be moved.
But now it moves 135 barrels at a time.
The lesson of the convoy
The tanker trucks crossing Iraq and Syria are a remarkable demonstration of adaptability.
They are keeping exports alive.
They are earning transit income.
They are preventing some storage facilities from overflowing.
They may protect oilfields from damaging shutdowns.
But they also reveal the limits of adaptation.
It takes nearly 15,000 of those trucks to equal the cargo of one VLCC.
It would take more than 111,000 loaded truck journeys every day to reproduce the normal crude flow through Hormuz.
And for all the thousands of vehicles already on the road, the achievement so far amounts to about one per cent of what the strait carries.
No amount of determination can erase that difference in scale.
This is why chokepoints are load-bearing.
It is why pipelines, ports, shipping lanes and storage facilities are not peripheral details in the energy debate.
And it is why cheap energy cannot be separated from the infrastructure that makes energy cheap.
The world does not run merely on barrels.
It runs on the ability to move millions of them, every day, without anyone having to think about the journey.
When that infrastructure fails, we discover the real size of the system only by attempting to replace it.
One truck.
One driver.
One border crossing.
One hundred and thirty-five barrels at a time.
This is a worked illustration of the framework set out in Why Cheap Energy Isn't Always Cheap — specifically, why a system optimised for efficiency cannot improvise redundancy once a crisis has begun. For the same cascade reaching the physical food system, see From Hormuz to the Checkout; for where the financial system is most likely to fracture under the same pressure, see The World Is a Pressure Cooker.
Sources: EIA (Strait of Hormuz volumes), IEA (bypass pipeline capacity and Hormuz security assessment), Bloomberg and Vortexa (Iraqi trucked flows, June 2026), Iraq Ministry of Oil, Al Arabiya and Enab Baladi (start of Baniyas fuel-oil exports, April 2026), Al Jazeera (Syrian road conditions), Enerdata and The National (Basra–Haditha pipeline), Global Energy Monitor (East–West and Habshan–Fujairah pipelines), Goldman Sachs (pipeline construction timelines and Hormuz diversion projections).