UAE to protect energy infrastructure and invest in new export routes, storage abroad and shipping fleets as Iran war continues
The UAE will protect its energy infrastructure and invest in new export routes, storage capacity abroad and shipping fleets to be better prepared for the continuing US-Israeli war on Iran, Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei said on Monday.
The United Arab Emirates is planning a lasting shift in how it moves its energy to world markets, rather than simply waiting out the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei said on Monday that the country will protect its energy infrastructure and invest in new export routes, storage capacity abroad and shipping fleets, so that it is better prepared for the US-Israeli war on Iran. He was speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference, known as ADIPEC, the country’s flagship oil industry gathering.
Mazrouei was candid about the limits of prediction. He said that what will happen in the war cannot be predicted, but that the UAE would be more prepared than before. That framing matters: the plan he described is not presented as a response to a single incident, but as a structural change in how a Gulf producer insures itself against a waterway that can be disrupted at short notice. His message to the industry was equally direct — that companies should think again about their facilities and redesign them to be more resilient in the future.
The geography behind the plan is the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman through which a large share of the world’s seaborne oil passes. Shipping through the strait has been disrupted since the US-Israeli war on Iran began on 28 February, and the disruption has driven up shipping and logistics costs, squeezed diesel supplies in some markets and drained global oil inventories. The UAE has already been using Fujairah, on its eastern coast, as an outlet that sits just outside the strait and opens directly onto the Gulf of Oman.
Fujairah is the centrepiece of the export-route part of the plan. The UAE has been exporting crude via Fujairah, and it is building a new pipeline to the port that will double crude capacity by next year. That pipeline, running from Abu Dhabi’s oilfields to the east coast, would allow a much larger share of the country’s crude to bypass the strait altogether. Alongside it, the minister’s reference to storage capacity abroad points to holding product closer to customers, so that a shipping interruption does not immediately translate into a supply shortage, while investment in shipping fleets points to greater control over the vessels that carry the cargo.
Mazrouei also gave a snapshot of how the UAE has coped so far. He told ADIPEC that at certain times his country’s exports were better than they had been before the war — a claim that reflects the Fujairah route and the country’s trading and logistics operations, rather than any suggestion that the war itself has been cost-free. The wider picture, set out separately at ADIPEC by ADNOC chief Sultan Al Jaber, is far grimmer: nearly one billion barrels have been drained from global oil inventories since the Hormuz disruption began, and shipping costs have risen from under 5 per cent of the cost of a barrel to more than 30 per cent.
The minister’s remarks sit within a broader Gulf debate about energy security that has intensified during ADIPEC. Al Jaber has called for an overhaul of global energy security systems, arguing that recent disruptions exposed vulnerabilities in supply chains, inventories, transport and the ability to deliver supplies to consumers. Mazrouei’s plan is the UAE’s national answer to the same problem: hard infrastructure, storage and fleets, built before the next disruption rather than after it.
It is also distinct from an earlier UAE statement on the same theme. In September, presidential adviser Anwar Gargash said the country’s energy exports would not be held hostage and pointed to expanding port capacity on the eastern coast, pipelines, railways and alternative cargo corridors. Monday’s statement goes further in one respect: it comes from the energy minister himself, at the industry’s own conference, and it names the three investments — routes, overseas storage and fleets — as a single package.
The timing is linked to the diplomatic calendar as well as the military one. Iranian negotiators have left Doha after three days of Qatar-mediated talks, with a draft proposal for a deal with the United States now being circulated, and oil prices fell more than 4 per cent on Monday on hopes that supply disruptions could ease. At the same time, President Donald Trump has said he would not launch new attacks on Iran before Tuesday’s US midterm elections, while not ruling out further military action afterwards — which leaves Gulf producers planning for both a deal and a renewed escalation.
What happens next will be measured in construction and contracts rather than in statements. The Fujairah pipeline’s doubling of capacity is due by next year, and the storage and fleet investments will take longer to show up in export figures. If the Doha draft produces a deal and the strait reopens, the new routes will look like insurance that was bought at the right time; if fighting resumes after the US elections, they could become the difference between a country that can keep exporting and one that cannot.
For energy markets, the significance of Mazrouei’s announcement is therefore less in any single project than in the direction it signals. The UAE, one of the world’s most important oil producers, is treating Hormuz disruption not as a temporary shock to be ridden out, but as a permanent risk to be engineered around — with new routes out of the Gulf, stocks held abroad and ships under its own influence. That is a long-term bet, and its payoff will be judged the next time the strait, rather than the conference hall, makes the news.
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