Great catch this from the Morse report:
🚨Recent satellite imagery suggests that the Department of War has conducted a covert dredging operation to open up a never-before-used shipping corridor through the Omani side of the Straits of Hormuz.
The corridor in question is an approximately 1,600-foot-wide waterway with a natural depth of about 93 feet. Meaning that only a small amount of dredging would have been necessary to make it safe for VLCCs (Very Large Crude Carriers).
Worth noting, ships navigating this corridor remain completely outside the Iranian regime's line of sight due to the Omani island of Jazirat Musandam and the curvature of the Earth.
I went to Grok to ask a few questions.
Seems the project was a covert US dredging job for a fresh shipping corridor on the Omani side of the straits.
Evidently with a little more dredging it will accommodate just about all crude carriers including the ones that haul massive amounts.
Grok says the new channel would still run through the straits just on the Omani side instead of the Iranian side making it still easy for Iran's' missiles and drones to teach with the choke-point problem really not going away accd. to grok. Ironically,some months ago I had looked into digging a channel on the oman/UAE side but discovered to have it far enough away too many obstacles were there. The biggest was a mountain range that's squarely in the way. On paper the canal is easier to defend but grok says not in reality.
Grok says the playbook already in motion is for the Saudi Arabia East-West pipeline and the UAE Fujairah line already moving millions of barrels a day around Hormuz by land to add numbers of crude moved.
Integrated Spill Response Solutions for the East-West Pipeline & Yanbu Terminal
The Habshan-Fujairahline alone handles about 1.8 million barrels daily. Add a second sea lane and you've got real redundancy accd. to grok. If A pipeline gets hit,by drones, missiles of sabotage, ships reroute and blocked oil still flows overland. The catch is capacity.
Those pipelines top out at around 5 million barrels a day combined. Hormuz can run 20 million barrels of crude a day so it cushions a crisis but it doesn't replace the straits. My take on all that is to bring on so-called free energy to bring up the rest.
Grok says it would blunt the worst of them a single strike or blockade couldn't choke of all the oil anymore. But, it wouldn't not solve the underlying problem which is that the Gulf still produces most of the worlds "spare capacity" and the straits are still the cheapest way to move it.
Pipelines and a second lanes buy time and resilience but don't change the geography.
The gulf stays the cheapest place to extract and ship oil,so the straits stay the default route no matter how many work-arounds exist. Grok cut me off and said come back tomorrow! I used too much of their valuable time. Talk about control! They want me to spend $3,000 instead of $300 a year. Can't and won't do it.
So I went to another AI,Brave.
It;s not as good and far more biased left wing but it works. Here's the answer to: "will pipelines save the day to get rid of the straits?:
From AI:
Gulf nations are accelerating pipeline construction to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. The UAE is targeting a mid-2027 operational date for a new parallel pipeline that would double its bypass capacity to approximately 3.6 million barrels per day.
Broader regional projects, including expansions to Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline and new Iraqi corridors through Syria and Turkey, are expected to come online between 2028 and 2030.
Analysts project that by the end of 2028, these new pipelines could handle more than 60% of the Gulf states' pre-war export volume. That much significantly reduces but not entirely eliminates reliance on the straits.
U.S. officials have claimed the straits could become "irrelevant" within two years. Energy experts argue that replacing the 20 million barrels per day historically shipped through the strait is mathematically impossible in the near term. Existing planned pipelines collectively capable of moving only about 9 to 12 million barrels per day still leave a gap.
