Saudi Aramco Sells 20M Barrels of Crude for Delivery Outside Strait of Hormuz

Routing cargoes to the Gulf of Oman via ship-to-ship transfer is a workaround for a pipeline outage that removed the Red Sea option, and it leaves the Strait of Hormuz as the only remaining chokepoint for these barrels. The buyers are Asian refiners, so the immediate read-through is on their supply logistics rather than on price. Whether the East-West pipeline stays offline, and whether ship-to-ship transfers become a recurring fixture rather than a stopgap, is the open question.