The world’s emergency oil cushion is mostly spent — just as conflict-driven disruptions keep growing

More than 43% of global oil supply comes from countries hit by conflict this year — Iran, Russia, Libya, Venezuela — with combined 2025 output of around 45 mn bbl / d, Reuters reports. The International Energy Agency (IEA)’s record 400 mn bbl emergency reserve release, agreed in March, is most of the way through — around 290 mn bbl had gone out as of July.

This is the point where the reserve buffer that absorbed six months of disruption is mostly spent. The IEA release was already more than double the volume tapped after Russia invaded Ukraine — the largest coordinated drawdown in the agency’s history. It bought time. Whether it bought enough is now the open question, with roughly three-quarters of it already out the door.

Gulf producers have rerouted what they can, and it still isn’t enough. Saudi Arabia has pushed crude through its East-West pipeline to Yanbu, running at around 7 mn bbl / d, while the UAE moves roughly 1.8 mn bbl / d through the Adcop pipeline to Fujairah. Even with both running near capacity — and with some Gulf barrels still slipping through Hormuz — analysts estimate the region is still short around 5-7 mn bbl / d. Attacks in the Red Sea and near the Suez corridor in July showed that bypassing Hormuz doesn’t move cargo beyond the conflict zone entirely.

This makes the case for treating Gulf redundancy infrastructure as a standing cost of doing business, not a one-off response. The Yanbu and Fujairah pipelines exist precisely because Hormuz risk was rising before this war started — and the last six months are the clearest evidence yet that redundant capacity, not reserve releases, is what actually holds when a chokepoint closes.

The bottom line: The oil market spent six months treating the IEA release as the backstop. That backstop is now most of the way spent, conflict-linked supply is still climbing past 43% of the global total, and the fuel-market lag behind crude supply means the next shock will show up in diesel and gasoline before it shows up in headline crude numbers. The open question for Gulf and Egyptian producers isn’t whether reserves get replenished — it’s whether pipeline and refining redundancy gets built fast enough to matter before the next disruption, not after.