TotalEnergies must invest in ways to bypass Hormuz, CEO says

French oil major TotalEnergies needs to prioritise the building of pipelines that could export oil and gas from the Middle East without ships going through the Strait of Hormuz, CEO Patrick Pouyanne said at an energy conference in Paris on Tuesday.

Pouyanne was asked what lessons he had learned from the past three months of the Iran crisis, given Total is the oil major most exposed to the Middle East, where the Iran war has paralysed the waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes en route to global markets.

“The reality is that the Strait of Hormuz represents a genuine threat, so we must act. To ensure it doesn’t remain a threat, there is only one solution: we must invest in pipelines to bypass the strait, that is an absolute priority,” he said.

Pouyanne mentioned alternative export routes in Abu Dhabi and Iraq, as well as through Syria.

“When you are in Iraq and you need to reach the sea, you can go down through Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, or head towards Syria or Turkey,” Pouyanne said.

He recalled that Total discovered oil in Iraq in 1928 and built an Iraq-Syria pipeline in six years, with the world’s largest tanker at the time transporting the oil across the Mediterranean to a refinery in southern France.

“If our predecessors did it 100 years ago, I believe we should be capable of doing it again today,” he added.

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