Gargash says UAE energy will not be held hostage to the Hormuz war

Anwar Gargash told the Hili Forum in Abu Dhabi on 7 September that the United Arab Emirates is building other paths for oil and trade so that neither is held hostage by the war between the United States and Iran. Our energy exports will not be held hostage, nor will our trade and economic activity, he said.

He listed eastern-coast port expansion, pipelines, railways and new trade corridors. The Habshan-Fujairah pipeline already takes crude from inland fields to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, outside the Strait of Hormuz. Reporting around the forum said that by early June the UAE had used such facilities to bring oil exports back to about 85 percent of pre-war volumes after February strikes.

Hormuz remains the ordinary route for Gulf barrels. Iranian missiles have hit the UAE and tankers in the strait. In August Abu Dhabi froze financial and economic dealings with Iran, cutting a channel that had long kept trade alive even when politics were frozen. Gargash said a functional relationship with Iran can and must be restored, but that rebuilding trust is another matter and may take decades.

He was blunt about Gulf coordination. Governments had agreed for years on the character of the Iranian challenge, he said. What failed was the conversion of that agreement into a united response after the attacks. He also said freedom of navigation is not a concession to be granted, nor a principle to be renegotiated under pressure, and that any longer settlement needs credible guarantees against further Iranian strikes on Gulf Arab states.

The speech lands beside Oman's rescue the same day of 16 crew from the Saudi tanker SIDR, hit off Musandam. Qatar has said the Gulf cannot lean on the United States alone. Gargash's version of that thought is infrastructure: more berths on the east coast, more pipe, more rail, less single-point exposure to a 21-mile strait.

Pipe and ports do not end a war. They change the price of trying to close the Gulf. If Fujairah and the eastern harbours keep taking crude while Hormuz is unsafe, Iran's leverage over UAE volumes falls even if tanker traffic inside the Gulf stays dangerous. That is the bet Gargash described, and it is already partly built.

Markets will watch two numbers. One is the share of UAE crude that leaves via Fujairah rather than via Hormuz. The other is whether other Gulf producers copy the same bypass. Gargash did not claim a regional pipeline pact. He claimed that the Emirates will not wait for one. For oil buyers that is a planning assumption they can put in a model. For Tehran it is a reminder that a strait closed to tankers is no longer a complete stop on Emirati barrels.