Mark Gagnon

And it's longer and it's more expensive, but it'll work.

If the Panama Canal is congested, there are other options.

But the Strait of Hormuz, if it's closed, roughly 20% of the world's oil supply is locked inside the Persian Gulf with really no ways to get out.

Sure, again, there's those pipelines on land, but it's just, it's completely ineffective for the quantity of oil.

Now, again, there are some alternatives.

So Saudi Arabia has the East-West pipeline, which can move about 5 million barrels per day to the Red Sea coast, bypassing Hormuz.

The UAE completed a pipeline in 2012, which can carry around 1.5 million barrels of oil per day to the Gulf of Oman, which again bypasses the Strait.

Iraq has pipelines running through Turkey, but combined, these alternatives can maybe handle like six or seven barrels per day.

Don't laugh at that, Chris.

That's a bad joke.

They can only handle like six or seven million barrels per day at max capacity.

Again, that's a third of what the normal transit going through the Strait is.

And they do nothing for the LNG tankers carrying Qatari and other liquefied natural gas exports, which have no pipeline alternative at all.

And that's really the vulnerability.

The modern global economy was built on the assumption that these choke points would just always remain open because everyone needs them.

And decades of globalization and

You know, these supply chains and the concentration of energy resources and the handful of regions connected to the world by a small, narrow waterway created this extraordinarily efficient system, but also it's fragile.

The Strait of Hormuz is the single point of failure that no one wants to talk about.

And what makes it uniquely dangerous is the asymmetry.

Iran...