Alternative oil routes ...
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Can the project be considered a solution to the current Strait of Hormuz crisis?
No — not as a short-term solution.
A project that is still undergoing feasibility studies and would require around four years to develop cannot address an immediate disruption in Hormuz. The current situation requires existing infrastructure: alternative pipelines, storage facilities, tanker-fleet flexibility, ship-to-ship operations where feasible, and adjustments in crude destinations and loading patterns.
But that does not make Kirkuk–Baniyas strategically unimportant. The disruption has demonstrated the cost of excessive dependence on a single export corridor. Baghdad’s continued pursuit of Syrian routes therefore makes sense as a longer-term policy objective.
The pipeline is “not a solution to today’s crisis; it is an investment against the next crisis.”
Could alternative routes eventually reduce the geopolitical importance of Hormuz?
Alternative routes can reduce the concentration of risk around Hormuz, but they cannot make the Strait irrelevant. The scale difference is fundamental.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, oil flows through Hormuz averaged 20.9 million barrels per day in the first half of 2025, equivalent to about 20% of global petroleum-liquids consumption and roughly one-quarter of global maritime oil trade. Against that scale, even a 2-million-barrel-per-day Kirkuk–Baniyas pipeline would be a diversification mechanism, not a replacement for the Persian Gulf maritime export system.
More importantly, Hormuz should not be viewed merely as a geographic chokepoint. It is an integral component of the “energy architecture of the Persian Gulf,” connecting the region’s producing states to the global maritime energy system. Its strategic importance therefore cannot be measured only by the volume that might theoretically be diverted through pipelines.
This is why claims that Hormuz could lose most of its strategic value within two years should be treated cautiously. Reducing dependence on Hormuz is fundamentally different from eliminating its strategic importance. Oil has more transportation alternatives than LNG, but available pipeline alternatives collectively remain far below normal Hormuz volumes. The Strait also carries LNG and other maritime trade for which equivalent land-based alternatives are much harder to establish.
There is also a broader geographic reality. Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the UAE can build additional export corridors, but these routes primarily “redistribute risk; they do not eliminate the underlying geography of the Persian Gulf.” They also create their own security, political, financial and infrastructure risks.
For Iran, this distinction is particularly important. Iran’s position along the northern shore of the Strait is a structural geographic fact, not a variable that can simply be engineered away. Alternative pipelines can diversify routes and reduce exposure to a chokepoint, but “infrastructure can diversify routes; it cannot relocate geography.”
From an Iranian energy perspective, therefore, the debate should not be framed as “Hormuz versus alternative routes.” The more realistic outcome is a diversified regional energy system in which Hormuz — and Iran’s geographic position within that system — remains structurally important.
The strategic objective should not be to make Hormuz irrelevant. It should be to ensure that no single disruption at Hormuz can translate into an uncontrollable global energy shock.
Kirkuk–Baniyas can contribute to that objective, not by eliminating Hormuz or removing Iran from the regional energy equation, but by adding another layer of “energy-route redundancy and geopolitical risk diversification.”
That is the more realistic way to understand both the future of Kirkuk–Baniyas and the enduring strategic importance of Hormuz.