Riyadh says its Hormuz bypass pumps 5.8 million barrels a day. Public port data sees almost no tankers

The free data that shows Hormuz shipping collapsing has lost sight of the route around it: Saudi Arabia's Red Sea terminals vanished from it the day after the Houthis hit two Saudi tankers.

Published 2026-10-13 · analysis

Saudi Arabia's way around the Strait of Hormuz is running again, by every account except the public one. The energy minister said on 6 October that the East-West pipeline had reached 5.8 million barrels a day; the naval coalition's maritime centre says loadings have resumed on the Red Sea and that ship tracking backs his figure; and Kpler counts Middle East crude exports above pre-war levels, with 40 per cent of them now bypassing the strait. IMF PortWatch, the free port-level dataset this site reads, has logged six tanker calls at Yanbu, the pipeline's Red Sea terminal, in the 72 days to 2 October, its latest day, and none since 9 September.

The public record has a cliff, and the cliff has a date. In June the terminal loaded 666,000 tonnes a day, almost five times its pre-closure average, as crude that could not leave through Hormuz left through the Red Sea instead; in the nine days to 22 July it still saw four to eight tankers a day. On 22 July the Houthis struck two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, two days after declaring Saudi-linked shipping a target. From the next day the count is zero, and not only at Yanbu: Saudi Arabia's Red Sea ports together showed about 6,000 tonnes a day of tanker exports in August, against more than 700,000 in June.

The oil has not stopped. Kpler put the pipeline at about 2 million barrels a day in August, the month the public data saw one tanker a week at Yanbu, and the coalition has loadings resuming at two terminals in late September, Yanbu and Al Muajjiz. PortWatch has no port by the second name. So the zero is a statement about what the free data can see, not about what Saudi Arabia ships. Whether the cargoes moved to a terminal the dataset does not track, load where its port boundaries do not reach, or sail with transponders off, the record cannot say, and this piece will not guess.

That blind spot matters more this week, because the war has reached the pipeline's owner. Saudi authorities report Riyadh's main airport hit on three days out of four, attacks the Houthis claim: three killed on 8 October, twelve on the 10th, and Dammam's airport hit on the 11th as Aramco sites were claimed. On the 12th the Houthi military claimed Riyadh airport again, and it has claimed Yanbu before. When a claim names the pipeline or its terminals, the free data will show no change, because it already shows nothing.

So read public counts of Saudi exports as a floor with a hole in it. The transponder count that put the bypass at almost five times normal in June now reads it as shut while its owner reports 5.8 of its 7 million barrels a day. Until that gap closes, the only measures of the route around Hormuz are a minister's word, a naval coalition's advisories and a commercial tracker's subscribers, and the next strike on it will be scored by them rather than by any data a reader can download.

† Port figures are IMF PortWatch daily tanker exports and tanker calls (ports.json), built from ship transponder (AIS) data and published with a lag; the latest day is 2 October. Pre-closure averages cover 28 February 2025 to 27 February 2026. The Red Sea ports are Yanbu (King Fahd Port and city), Rabigh, Jeddah and Duba; PortWatch lists no Al Muajjiz. Pipeline and export figures are the Saudi energy minister's, JMIC's and Kpler's as reported in the linked events; none is independently checked here.

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