Pipelines and Chokepoints: Energy Has a Map
Electricity is the exception in energy: it is generated near where it is used. Everything else travels, often thousands of kilometres, and the routes are far fewer than the trade volumes suggest. A handful of places carry a share of world energy out of all proportion to their size.
The Straits That Matter
Hormuz is the most consequential. Every barrel leaving the Persian Gulf by sea passes through it, which is roughly a fifth of global oil consumption and a comparable share of liquefied gas. At its narrowest the strait is about 33 kilometres wide, with shipping lanes narrower still. Bypass pipelines exist across Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and their combined capacity falls well short of the flow they would need to replace.
Malacca is the second. It is the shortest sea route between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and most Middle Eastern oil bound for China, Japan and Korea passes through it. It is narrow, shallow, busy and historically prone to piracy. Chinese policy has referred to this dependence explicitly for two decades, and the pipelines through Myanmar and Central Asia are among the responses.
Suez and the adjacent SUMED pipeline connect the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, carrying a smaller but significant share. The alternative is around the Cape of Good Hope, which adds roughly two weeks to a voyage from the Gulf to Europe - not a blockage but a cost, and one that ties up tanker capacity worldwide when it is used.
The Turkish Straits carry Russian and Caspian oil to the Mediterranean through the middle of Istanbul, and the Danish straits carry Baltic exports. Both are narrow, both are governed by treaty rather than by the coastal state's discretion, and both illustrate that a chokepoint's status is a legal arrangement as much as a physical one.
Why a Pipeline Is Different from a Ship
A tanker can go anywhere there is a port. If a buyer refuses a cargo, the seller finds another buyer and the ship changes course. This flexibility is why oil has a genuine world price: the commodity is fungible and the transport is not committed to any route.
A pipeline is the opposite. It connects one specific origin to one specific destination, costs billions, and lasts decades. Once built, the seller can sell to that buyer and the buyer can buy from that seller, and neither has an alternative without building something else. Economists call this bilateral monopoly, and it converts a commercial relationship into a political one.
The consequences run in both directions, which is the part usually left out. The buyer depends on the supply. The supplier equally depends on the revenue and cannot redirect the molecules elsewhere. Which side has leverage depends on who can find an alternative faster, and that answer changes with market conditions rather than being fixed by the geography.
Gas was historically the extreme case, because it is expensive to transport and was effectively pipeline-only. That is what made gas relationships so politically loaded compared with oil, and it is also what changed when liquefaction became cheap enough to matter.
What Liquefied Gas Changed
Cooling methane to minus 162 degrees shrinks it by a factor of about six hundred, which makes it shippable. The infrastructure is expensive - a liquefaction plant, specialised vessels, a regasification terminal - and once it exists, gas becomes a commodity that can move between any two coasts.
The effect on gas markets has been structural. Regional prices that were once set by long bilateral contracts now respond to a global spot market, and a buyer cut off from a pipeline can bid for a cargo instead. That is precisely what Europe did in 2022, and it is the main reason the physical shortage many expected did not occur.
The trade-off is exposure. A country on the spot market is insulated from any single supplier and fully exposed to the world price, so it competes for cargoes with everyone else. In 2022 that competition bid volumes away from price-sensitive buyers in South and Southeast Asia, several of whom burned more coal as a direct result. Security bought in one region was partly paid for in another, and that connection is worth naming plainly.
The infrastructure also takes time and money, and building it commits a country to gas for the decades over which the terminal must pay back. Several of the terminals built as emergency measures in 2022 embody a bet on gas demand that extends well past the emergency that justified them.
The New Vulnerability
Until recently, undersea infrastructure was treated as safe by obscurity. Cables and pipelines on the seabed were unmarked, unguarded and assumed to be uninteresting to anyone.
The damage to the Nord Stream pipelines in 2022 and to several Baltic Sea cables and pipelines in the years following removed that assumption. A seabed asset is difficult to monitor along its length, cheap to damage and slow to repair, and attribution is hard enough that deterrence works poorly.
This altered how interconnectors and offshore wind connections are assessed. A submarine cable that is the sole link between two systems is now analysed as a single point of failure in a way it was not a decade ago, and redundancy that looked like waste is being reconsidered.
The general lesson connects this page to the rest of the section. Concentration is the risk, whether the concentration is in a supplier, a strait, a pipeline or a cable. The countermeasures are the same in each case - more routes, more suppliers, more substitutable equipment, and where possible generation that does not need a route at all. That last option is the one that has changed most in the past decade, because local generation has become cheap enough to be a serious answer to a geographic problem rather than a marginal one.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Strait of Hormuz and why does it matter?
The sea passage out of the Persian Gulf, about 33 kilometres wide at its narrowest. Every barrel leaving the Gulf by sea passes through it - roughly a fifth of global oil consumption and a comparable share of liquefied gas. Bypass pipelines across Saudi Arabia and the UAE exist but carry far less than the flow they would replace.
Why is a pipeline more political than a tanker route?
Because it connects one origin to one destination, costs billions and lasts decades. Neither party has an alternative without building something new, which turns a commercial relationship into a bilateral monopoly. A tanker can change course; a pipeline cannot, so the dependence runs in both directions.
How did liquefied natural gas change energy geopolitics?
By making gas shippable between any two coasts, it broke the pipeline's monopoly and created a global spot market. A buyer cut off from a pipeline can bid for a cargo instead - which is what Europe did in 2022, and the main reason the physical shortage many expected did not materialise.
What is the downside of relying on the spot market for gas?
Full exposure to the world price. A country buying on the spot market is insulated from any single supplier but competes for cargoes with everyone else. In 2022 that competition bid volumes away from price-sensitive buyers in South and Southeast Asia, several of whom burned more coal as a direct result.
Why has undersea infrastructure become a concern?
Because the damage to Nord Stream in 2022 and to several Baltic cables afterwards ended the assumption that seabed assets were safe by obscurity. Such assets are hard to monitor along their length, cheap to damage, slow to repair, and difficult to attribute, which makes deterrence weak.
