Middle East oil exports, excluding Iran, pushed past the pre-war average of 18 million barrels per day last week, even as attacks continued in the Strait of Hormuz, according to Kpler's tracking data.

Crude exports alone reached pre-war levels in September, with at least 16.5 million barrels a day leaving the region outside Iranian volumes, Kpler reported on Wednesday. Before the war, roughly a fifth of the world's petroleum supplies transited Hormuz.

The recovery rests on a structural shift in routing. "Forty percent now bypass Hormuz, and most crude crossing the strait changes tankers offshore," Kpler said. Most of that oil moves through Saudi and UAE pipelines.

The figures include flows via the Red Sea, a corridor increasingly used to sidestep the blockade Iran is attempting to impose on Hormuz.

What does the routing shift mean for tankers?

Two pipelines carry the rerouted barrels:

• Saudi Arabia's East–West pipeline, linking the kingdom's main eastern oil fields to the Yanbu terminal on the Red Sea. Struck on Sept. 11 by attacks launched from Iraq, it shut down and resumed operations on Sept. 22, Kpler analyst Amena Bakr confirmed last week.
• The UAE pipeline running from Abu Dhabi's fields to Fujairah, a terminal on the Gulf of Oman just outside the strait.

Iran still claims control over Hormuz, and ships sailing without its authorization risk attack. But more and more vessels are making it through, and the alternative routes around the waterway are operating at full capacity.

The commercial consequences ripple across the tanker market. Ship-to-ship transfers offshore, where most Hormuz-bound crude changes tankers, add voyage segments and ton-mile demand even as headline volumes recover. Full utilization of the Saudi and UAE bypass lines means any further disruption at Hormuz has limited slack left to absorb — pipeline capacity, not chartering appetite, is now the binding constraint.

Is the market back to normal?

No. Experts stress the situation remains far from normal, and Iran is still cut off from a large share of its own exports by a U.S. counterblockade of its ports.

That asymmetry defines the current market: Gulf Arab producers are moving record-relevant volumes around the chokepoint, while Iranian barrels stay largely shut in. Saudi Arabia is the clearest beneficiary of the East–West pipeline's reactivation, giving its crude a Hormuz-free path to Red Sea loading at Yanbu.

For refiners and traders, the message in the Kpler data is that supply security has been restored through infrastructure rather than through any easing of the confrontation at the strait. The routing is durable only as long as the pipelines keep running — as the Sept. 11 strike and the 11-day outage that followed demonstrated.

With bypass infrastructure now saturated and Iran's blockade claims unresolved, export volumes above 18 million bpd depend on both pipelines holding up under continued regional attacks.