Can the Gulf truck their way out of Hormuz?

When ships stall, trucks roll: As disruption risk builds around Hormuz, Gulf producers are activating land corridors and trucking networks to keep trade moving.

But maritime transport remains unbeatable: Hormuz handles roughly a fifth of global energy trade, and replicating that volume overland could be structurally constrained. A single VLCC carries some 2 mn barrels, while a road tanker carries around 190-300 barrels — meaning 8k-10k trucks, and a lot of trips to match a single cargo.

What’s changing is not the system — it’s the geometry of power behind it: “The shift underway is less about replacing Hormuz and more about redistributing risk, access, and leverage across multiple routes — pipelines, Red Sea ports, inland corridors — rather than concentrating in a single narrow waterway,” former head of supply chain and transport industries at the World Economic Forum Wolfgang Lehmacher tells EnterpriseAM.

The model is shifting: Instead of relying on one optimal route, trade is moving toward a portfolio approach, where redundancy is built in to absorb shocks.

What is being activated now

A south-east corridor: Dubai Customs has introduced a temporary corridor between Dubai and Oman to expedite customs procedures for sea and air cargo. Shipments originally bound for Dubai’s Jebel Ali Port or Dubai International Airport are rerouted through Omani ports and airports, then transported via bonded trucks through the Hatta-Al Wajajah border crossing.

And more rerouting through Oman… Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA) will reroute its aluminum exports and raw materials through Oman’s port of Sohar in the coming days to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, three sources told Reuters. Alumina feedstock will then be transported by truck to either Dubai or Abu Dhabi for smelting.

A north-west corridor: Saudi’s parallel move centers around the logistics corridors initiative, designed to receive containers and cargo redirected from the Eastern region and other GCC ports into Jeddah and other Red Sea ports. Reports also cite fleet readiness, with 500k trucks and 18.5k licensed companies.

On the ground, this isn’t a replacement system — it’s a layered one: “We must stop asking which single route will dominate and instead design portfolios of corridors that give us options when geopolitics, markets, or climate turn against us,” Lehmacher told us.

What can be rerouted by truck, and what cannot

The trucks vs tankers debate misses the point — this is about cargo selection, not substitution. Land logistics doesn’t replace ships, but prioritizes what gets to move.

High-value and time-sensitive cargo sits at the front of the queue: Pharma, industrial components, electronics, and critical spare parts can justify expensive road diversion because downtime or stockouts cost more than freight.

Containerized consumer and industrial goods form the middle ground: Packaged food, FMCG, and general cargo can be rerouted through alternative ports and moved inland by trucks — but only at manageable volumes and limited periods before costs escalate.

Bulk commodities are the hardest to reroute: Crude oil, LNG, grains, and aluminium operate at scales where trucking is effectively irrelevant.

The economics make the hierarchy obvious: Long-haul trucking costs can be dozens of times higher per ton-km than maritime, meaning road diversion only makes sense when time becomes more expensive than transport. Heavy trucking for containers can run around EUR 0.11 per ton-km, vs a fraction of that cost for maritime transport thanks to massive economies of scale.

The limiting factor

It’s not just “put it on a truck”: A landbridge requires transit declarations, customs seal, and document verification, which compresses the pool of eligible operators and adds administrative load.

Road capacity is not just asphalt: Road freight costs also include driver and fuel costs plus intermediate-node costs like border crossings and security checkpoints — exactly the stuff that balloons when you move from steady-state trade to emergency surges.

And the risk doesn’t disappear: Every new corridor can itself become a chokepoint if built in isolation, Lehmacher said — meaning shifting flows from sea to land doesn’t eliminate vulnerability, it redistributes it.

What’s next

A routing war on the logistical front? Ports outside Hormuz — mainly in Oman — gain relevance as discharge points and staging hubs, while Red Sea gateways get a second chance at capturing flows if cross-peninsula corridors hold.

But this isn’t — or shouldn’t be — a zero-sum race for a single dominant hub: “In a world of weaponised interdependence, there is more value in a connected Middle Eastern platform of interoperable hubs – Jeddah, Yanbu, Dammam, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Salalah, Aqaba and others – than in a race where everyone tries to become “the” hub,” Lehmacher noted.

The longer this lasts, the stickier it gets: Once routes are redesigned, cargo doesn’t automatically snap back — the winners could hold that position long after the crisis ends.

Our take

The underlying model is already changing: We are moving from an era of narrow optimization to an era of strategic redundancy, where resilient efficiency — not minimal cost — defines a well‑designed network. When the same lanes and chokepoints are repeatedly disrupted, building supply chains around a single “most efficient” route is no longer efficient; it is a concentration of risk.

The future isn’t one dominant route — it’s a portfolio of corridors. Power in global trade is shifting from control of a single chokepoint to control of multiple options when it fails.