All eyes on the Strait of Hormuz, a 90-mile strip critical to global oil prices(businessinsider.com)
businessinsider.com
All eyes on the Strait of Hormuz, a 90-mile strip critical to global oil prices
https://www.businessinsider.com/iran-strait-of-hormuz-important-for-global-oil-prices-2025-6
6 comments
If I eyeball it right, the canal would need to be least 150 km long (Suez is about 200km) and the lowest high spot is 300m elevation (Gatun Lake for the Panama canal is 26 m).
There's no water available for locks.
Take a look at the traffic going through the strait now - https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:54.2/cente... . One canal isn't enough.
You'll need some big locks. The first ship I clicked on was the crude tanker Al Yarmouk, 333 meters long and 60 meters wide. This is too large to fit into the Panama Canal. Panamax is 289.56 m long and 32.31 m wide.
Sounds pretty expensive to me.
There's no water available for locks.
Take a look at the traffic going through the strait now - https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:54.2/cente... . One canal isn't enough.
You'll need some big locks. The first ship I clicked on was the crude tanker Al Yarmouk, 333 meters long and 60 meters wide. This is too large to fit into the Panama Canal. Panamax is 289.56 m long and 32.31 m wide.
Sounds pretty expensive to me.
> Sounds pretty expensive to me.
The Gulf states are exceedingly wealthy.
The Gulf states are exceedingly wealthy.
I don't think you realize how much water and power would be needed.
My back-of-the-envelope calculations says it needs the water of 30 Panama canals [1], in a region with very little water. It's possible to use seawater, but water is very expensive to pump, requiring the world's biggest power plant. You'll also have to build the world's tallest lock system, by far, with a dozen lockings, so passage will slow,
I can't even begin to calculate the cost of a sea-level canal.
[1] It looks like there are 36,000 transits of the strait per year, compared to under 14,000 for the Panama canal. The ships going through the strait are much larger than Panamax. The canal would be several times higher than the Panama canal. Each locking requires significant water. As a wild-ass guess, each is factor of 3, giving 27, which I rounded to 30.
That's about 60 billion cubic meters of water.
If I get it right, that's enough to cover the 310 km^2 of Oman with 20 cm of water, or since that water doesn't exist in the region, it's about 200 GW of continuous power to pump that water from sealevel - about 9x the power of the Three Gorges Dam, or 70 TW hours in annual electrical consumption - about that of Austria.
My back-of-the-envelope calculations says it needs the water of 30 Panama canals [1], in a region with very little water. It's possible to use seawater, but water is very expensive to pump, requiring the world's biggest power plant. You'll also have to build the world's tallest lock system, by far, with a dozen lockings, so passage will slow,
I can't even begin to calculate the cost of a sea-level canal.
[1] It looks like there are 36,000 transits of the strait per year, compared to under 14,000 for the Panama canal. The ships going through the strait are much larger than Panamax. The canal would be several times higher than the Panama canal. Each locking requires significant water. As a wild-ass guess, each is factor of 3, giving 27, which I rounded to 30.
That's about 60 billion cubic meters of water.
If I get it right, that's enough to cover the 310 km^2 of Oman with 20 cm of water, or since that water doesn't exist in the region, it's about 200 GW of continuous power to pump that water from sealevel - about 9x the power of the Three Gorges Dam, or 70 TW hours in annual electrical consumption - about that of Austria.
Nobody is going to pay to use such a canal except during extraordinary geopolitical events.
Plus, it doesn’t help with the current situation.
Plus, it doesn’t help with the current situation.
I seem to recall something along those lines was being talked about ...
... that or a 'multimodal' logistics link of some sort.-
... that or a 'multimodal' logistics link of some sort.-
How much of a pain would it be to build a canal through the UAE and Oman to go around the Strait of Hormuz? I don't think that cost would be a problem.