The GCC railway would solve half of the Gulf’s Hormuz problem, and the half it can’t solve sits beyond the Gulf’s borders

How much of the Gulf’s Hormuz problem can a railway officially due in 2030 solve? Half, according to Afaq Hussain, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Project for Middle East Integration. The GCC rail network “solves half the problem,” he tells EnterpriseAM, because it would link the six Gulf states without reaching the Mediterranean. Cargo leaving the Gulf by rail, pipeline, or road still has to cross a chokepoint or a border the Gulf doesn’t control.

The railway is meant to bypass Hormuz by land, but the full network is unlikely by 2030. According to published plans, Saudi Arabia’s 672-km section, from the Kuwaiti border to the UAE border, completes design around 2028 before construction is tendered, and building it takes years, Wolfgang Lehmacher, former head of supply chain and transport industries at the World Economic Forum, tells us. He expects the network in the early 2030s at best. Oman-UAE services by 2030 are realistic, he says, but the Saudi stretch, and with it Kuwait-to-Oman, is not. Researchers at UMass Boston argue the railway would help “reduce dependence on the Strait of Hormuz,” and France’s Systra is the frontrunner for the Saudi design contract, MEED reported.

Its progress is harder to measure: PwC puts the GCC Railway at 50% complete in its May Middle East Economy Watch, without saying what the 50% measures. Mohammad Al Shabrami, director general of the GCC Railways Authority, said in the same month that overall completion had exceeded 50%.

One network, separate clocks

Each stretch is financed and tendered separately by the country it crosses. Hafeet Rail, the Oman-UAE link, is a joint venture of Etihad Rail and Oman’s Asyad Group, with Mubadala. It was about 50% complete in June, and Oman’s transport minister said in September that a trial run starts in 4Q 2027. Oman ratified its railway agreement with the UAE last month, formalizing its side of the cross-border link.

Hafeet’s 4Q 2027 trial is achievable but tight, Lehmacher says. The remaining tunnels, bridges, and systems integration will decide the date. A trial is not a service, he adds, and he expects regular container trains in 2028, subject to border procedures.

Governments are starting to coordinate across the stretches. The project has “strategic, security, and social dimensions,” Bahrain’s Transportation Ministry said. The UAE and Saudi Arabia signed their first memorandum on the link between them in early October, setting out general principles for a joint rail network that can carry cargo, plus technical and economic studies, AGBI reported.

Paying for certainty

Shippers will pick rail only if its price beats sea and road, and a crisis changes what they will pay. Rail “doesn’t get to hold a share it cannot defend on price” against sea or road transport, Urs Mosimann previously told us. A single sea journey is cheaper than multimodal movement at any point, but “the definition of economic efficiency changes” in a crisis, Hussain says, and in one like Hormuz, a shipper will accept even a USD 5k premium if it means the cargo is secure and arrives.

The premium is probably structural, and rail will compete selectively. The Red Sea crisis showed the value of routing flexibility, Antonella Teodoro, senior transport consultant at MDS Transmodal, tells EnterpriseAM, so shippers are likely to put greater value on alternative land corridors even as conditions normalize, though not necessarily at a permanent, large premium in freight rates. Rail is more likely to compete selectively with short-sea and feeder services than to replace them, she says, with the greatest potential where it offers an advantage in transit time, reliability, or end-to-end connectivity, particularly for time-sensitive intra-GCC movements. She also sees a “credible scenario” in which rail increases maritime activity by expanding the effective hinterlands of ports and facilitating transshipment.

The Gulf’s edge

The Mediterranean leg lies beyond the Gulf, and it is still a plan. The other options into the Mediterranean run through Jordan, Syria, and Israel, Hussain says, including Haifa port and Syria’s Tartous and Latakia ports. “It doesn’t really give us real Middle Eastern connectivity into the Mediterranean that we are dreaming about. But it solves a lot of problems,” Hussain adds. Saudi Arabia and Turkey signed two memorandums in June to build that link through Jordan and Syria, with about 400 km of track still missing between Syria and Jordan.

An expanded India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) could replace roughly 60% of container traffic through Hormuz, Hussain said earlier this year. Its four nodes (Oman, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria, reached via Jordan) together provide about 20 mn TEU of annual Mediterranean exit capacity, against the 33 mn TEU Hormuz handles a year in normal conditions.

The caveat: The bottleneck is at the border, Hussain says. “You can build the best railway network, you can build the best roads, but if your movement is stuck because of regulations at the border, it doesn’t serve your purpose,” Hussain adds. He cites a container truck stranded for weeks at the Jordan-Israel crossing and Saudi-UAE driver visas delayed by nationality. His fix is a common one-stop border post. At crossings, including UAE-Saudi, Saudi-Jordan, Jordan-Israel, and Jordan-Syria, a driver would submit documents once, and clearance would be transmitted to both countries. The GCC began harmonizing customs more than 20 years ago, he says, and the effort stalled during the Qatar crisis.

Another chokepoint

Oil and gas need pipelines, which Hussain calls “G2G, political, big decisions.” Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline has a maximum capacity of 7 mn bbl/d, and flows fell to about 2 mn bbl/d in August, the lowest month since January, Kpler data show, as Houthi attacks made the Red Sea route hard to use. Saudi Arabia shut the line in September after drone attacks it blamed on Iraqi militias and restarted it later that month, and the energy minister said it was moving 5.8 mn bbl/d earlier this month.

Saudi crude kept reaching buyers while the pipeline was shut, because Riyadh sent more of it through Hormuz. Saudi Arabia was on track to ship an estimated 5.4 mn bbl/d in September, up from about 2.45 mn bbl/d in August, according to Kpler data cited by Reuters show and carried by IDN Financials. Kpler Commodity Research Director Matt Smith told CNBC the ramp-up was “a consequence of the pipeline outage,” though it likely also signals “a greater confidence in using Hormuz.”

Riyadh now wants 10 mn bbl / d of pipeline capacity outside the Gulf within two to three years, Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said. The fastest barrels could come from an existing gas line converted to carry about 1.2 mn bbl/d of crude within seven to eight weeks, with further investment lifting that to 3 mn bbl/d, but the conversion starts out temporary: the line has to return to domestic gas by May, and Aramco is studying a dual-use setup that could switch it between oil and gas. Riyadh also signed a memorandum with Qatar this month to explore pipelines to export oil and gas, and no routes or timeline are public yet.

The northern exit has a limit of its own. Yanbu crude bound for Europe can go north through Suez, but Asia-bound cargoes currently sail south through Bab Al Mandab, where the Houthi blockade applies. The alternative, around the Cape, roughly doubles a Yanbu-Chiba voyage from about four weeks to about eight, Kpler says. The Sumed pipeline can carry about 2.5 mn bbl/d, against the 4.2 mn bbl/d of crude Saudi Arabia exported from Yanbu in April, Kpler says, and loadings at Sidi Kerir, its Mediterranean end, reached around 2.3 mn bbl/d in August.

THE BOTTOM LINE- Only the Oman-UAE part of the answer is realistic by 2030, according to Lehmacher, and the first link he would fund is Khorfakkan. The Saudi stretch has no designer yet, and until borders and the Mediterranean leg are solved, cargo leaving the Gulf still crosses a chokepoint or a border the Gulf doesn’t control.