US vows to halt Iran’s oil exports as Saudi starts building Duqm pipeline around Strait of Hormuz
US Treasury Secretary Bessent says Iran will have no oil on the water and no revenues this week, while TotalEnergies’ CEO reports that Saudi Arabia has begun building a pipeline to Oman’s Duqm port to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.
The United States is promising to sharply limit Iran’s oil exports just as Saudi Arabia moves ahead with a route that would let its own crude avoid the Strait of Hormuz.
US Treasury Secretary Bessent has said Iran will have no oil on the water this week and no revenues, according to Axios. In a separate remark, Bessent framed this as the first time since Iran began pumping oil that the country would reach a week with neither oil on the water nor revenues.
The details of how Washington intends to enforce that level of pressure are not laid out in the available reports. But the goal described by Bessent would imply a push to stop Iranian crude from leaving port in the first place or to prevent it from reaching buyers.
For Iran, oil income is a central source of state revenue. A week without export receipts would be a short-term jolt; a longer period would force harder choices over domestic spending and external commitments.
At the same time, Saudi Arabia is working on its own answer to the risk around Hormuz. The CEO of TotalEnergies says the kingdom has begun work on a pipeline to Duqm in Oman, a project intended to bypass the Strait of Hormuz by sending oil directly to the Arabian Sea.
Hormuz is a narrow passage between Iran and Oman that carries a large share of the world’s seaborne oil shipments and sits at the heart of Tehran’s leverage over Gulf traffic. A functioning Saudi pipeline to Duqm would not remove that leverage, but it would give Riyadh an alternative outlet if shipping lanes close or come under threat in the Gulf.
Iran’s export squeeze is already being felt in Asia. Halts have hit almost all of China’s listed refiners as Iranian crude exports collapse to around 0.5 million barrels per day, according to market-focused reporting. That drop in flows is disrupting refiners that had come to rely on Iranian barrels.
Taken together, the US effort to push Iran’s exports down and Saudi Arabia’s pipeline project point in the same direction: a Gulf energy map where Iran’s oil is more constrained and where major producers with the means to do so are investing in routes that reduce their exposure to Hormuz.
In the coming weeks, satellite tracking of tankers leaving Iranian ports and any visible progress on the Saudi–Oman pipeline will show whether Bessent’s pledge and Riyadh’s bypass plan are reshaping flows in practice, or remain mostly political signals.
Sources
- OSINT