Europe's Energy Trap
Railways for Regional Peace described a trade corridor — IMEC — being cleared by three wars, with Israel positioned as the physical clearinghouse node between the developing world and Europe.
This essay discusses what it means for the Gulf states, and how it could realistically lead to the collapse of Europe.
The states that were ready
The United Arab Emirates spent $4.2 billion on the Habshan-Fujairah crude oil pipeline in 20121. The pipeline runs 360 kilometres overland from Abu Dhabi’s oil fields to the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz entirely. The UAE built 42 million barrels of underground crude storage at Fujairah — the largest facility of its kind in the world2.
In 2011, it partnered with Oman to establish a Special Economic Zone at Duqm, a deep-water port on the Arabian Sea, well outside every major chokepoint3. Duqm now covers an area three times the size of Singapore4.
Saudi Arabia built its own bypass decades earlier. The 1,200-kilometre East-West pipeline runs from the Eastern Province oil fields to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, carrying up to seven million barrels per day5. The Saudi Landbridge rail project from Riyadh to Jeddah is under construction6. The IMEC rail segment connecting Ghuwaifat and Haradh to Jordan is underway7.
When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz on 28 February 2026, both countries were operationally prepared. The Fujairah pipeline immediately ran at full capacity. Yanbu absorbed Saudi crude exports diverted from the Gulf. Neither country experienced an export crisis. Both had spent years — and billions — building the infrastructure to survive exactly this scenario.
The states that were not
Kuwait has no bypass pipeline. Its largest oil refinery was struck by Iranian missiles in the first week of April8. Bahrain has no bypass — warning sirens have sounded across Manama repeatedly since the war began9. Qatar declared force majeure on all LNG shipments after Iranian missiles struck the Ras Laffan complex on 19 March, taking seventeen per cent of the country’s natural gas export capacity offline for an estimated three to five years10. Iraq’s oil exports through Basra — 3.3 million barrels per day — are trapped behind the closed strait11.
None of these countries had invested in overland bypass infrastructure on the scale of the UAE or Saudi Arabia. Their export revenues depend almost entirely on tanker12 traffic through Hormuz, and with the strait effectively closed — traffic has dropped from 150 vessels a day to fewer than twenty — their oil and gas has nowhere to go.
The dependency this produces is already visible. If Kuwait wants to export crude, it must route through Saudi overland infrastructure. If Qatar wants to move LNG, it must find alternative port capacity in Oman or the UAE. If Iraq wants its Basra production to reach market, it depends on pipelines through Saudi Arabia or Turkey — the very routes IMEC is designed to connect.
The Gulf states that pre-built the bypass now control the terms under which the Gulf states that did not get to export at all, and those terms align with the corridor.
The bypass that was already planned
This week, Gulf sovereign wealth funds are studying a $10 billion pipeline connecting Gulf oil fields to Oman’s Duqm port. The Defence Horizon Journal published a detailed proposal for an emergency canal from Fujairah to Sharjah — a ‘Gulf Suez Canal’ cutting 116 kilometres through the Hajar mountains13. The National, the UAE’s paper of record, published an editorial arguing the risk-reward calculation for bypass pipelines is ‘overwhelmingly’ favourable, ‘even if it is used once in two decades’14.
Every proposed bypass feeds into the same overland network: UAE to Oman, Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea, overland rail through Jordan to Israel, and from Haifa across the Mediterranean15. The routes being accelerated under the pressure of the Hormuz closure are the routes IMEC was designed to connect.
Oman is the final piece. Etihad Rail in the UAE is extending to Sohar16. The pipeline to Duqm is under discussion. Ships are already rerouting to Omani ports — four hundred vessels are holding position in the Gulf of Oman17, waiting for the strait to reopen, with Duqm, Sohar, and Salalah handling the overflow. Dubai Customs has established a ‘Green Corridor’ between Oman and the UAE for efficient cargo movement18.
Once Oman is connected to the overland network, the entire Gulf export system routes around Hormuz permanently. The sea lane from India arrives at ports outside the strait, the rail and pipeline carry everything overland through Saudi Arabia to Haifa, and from Haifa it crosses the Mediterranean to Europe.
The Hormuz closure is building the commercial case for the final segment of IMEC’s bypass infrastructure — making Hormuz permanently irrelevant.
The European end
Europe receives twelve to fourteen per cent of its LNG from Qatar, through the Strait of Hormuz19. That supply is now offline. Russian pipeline gas, which supplied roughly forty per cent of European consumption before 2022, was severed by the Ukraine war and made physically irreversible by the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022.
What remains of Europe’s domestic fossil fuel capacity is being wound down by design. Between 2014 and 2018, seven private forums at a Rothschild family estate, Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, developed the framework for climate-related financial risk — the argument that fossil fuel assets would become ‘stranded’ as climate policy tightened, and that financial institutions needed to reprice them in advance.
The forums fed the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, which fed the Network for Greening the Financial System, which calibrates the capital requirements that determine what banks can lend against through Basel 3.1.
The effect is that European banks cannot finance domestic fossil fuel development at competitive rates. North Sea oil production is declining. European fracking is politically blocked in every major economy. Nuclear power was politically suppressed for decades across most of the continent, Germany closed their remaining nuclear reactors20, and the reversal now under discussion will take years to produce capacity.
Europe’s REPowerEU plan targets ten million tonnes of imported green hydrogen per year by 203021. IMEC’s energy pillar — hydrogen pipelines and electricity cables running from the Gulf through Saudi Arabia and Israel to the Mediterranean — is designed to deliver exactly that. Russian gas is destroyed, Qatari LNG is offline, and domestic production is impossible to finance. What remains is imported energy through the corridor, on conditions attached to its digital and regulatory infrastructure.
The same India Maritime Week presentation concluded with a slogan for the shipping industry: ‘The future of shipping is green — by necessity, not by choice’22. The phrase describes the European energy position with precision.
The green transition was not chosen. The alternatives were removed through input constraint23, and what remains is green — by necessity, not by choice.
The pattern
At India Maritime Week on 29 September 202524, India’s Director General of Shipping promoted IMEC and, in the same presentation, named the geopolitical disruptions that make the corridor necessary: the Suez Canal blockage, the Russia-Ukraine war, and US tariff wars.
The officials promoting the corridor were presenting the conflicts as its commercial justification.
On slide four of a presentation25, the Director General placed IMEC and its competitor side by side. On the left: Chabahar Port, India’s $120 million investment in Iran, the gateway to the International North-South Transport Corridor — a route promising thirty per cent cost savings and forty per cent faster transit. On the right: IMEC’s rail and sea route through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. Between the two, a box labelled ‘Challenges’ listing the risks to Chabahar: ‘Concern of US with Iran: Potential risk of sanctions’ and ‘Houthi-Red Sea Crisis’.
The Indian government was presenting both corridors to a trade audience while flagging the exact risks that would, five months later, destroy one of them.
The Hormuz closure is now accelerating Gulf bypass infrastructure that feeds into IMEC. The destruction of Iranian military capacity is eliminating the competing corridors — Iraq’s Development Road26 and the INSTC27 — that would have bypassed Israel. India’s Chabahar sanctions waiver expires this month28. The Chabahar-Zahedan railway, a key component of the INSTC due for completion in 2026, faces what Chatham House calls ‘indefinite delays’29.
Europe’s energy options are being narrowed to the single corridor that connects Gulf hydrogen production to Mediterranean ports.
The UAE, which signed the Abraham Accords in 202030, pre-built every piece of bypass infrastructure years before the war that made it necessary. DP World, the UAE’s state-owned ports operator, now holds thirty-year concessions on two Syrian ports along the corridor route31. Adani Ports, which is developing India’s IMEC terminal, owns Haifa32.
Nobody chose dependency on IMEC. The alternatives were removed — by war, by regulation, by physical destruction — each through a different mechanism, operated by different actors, over different timescales. What remains is the one route that was proposed in 2018 as ‘Railways for Regional Peace’, formalised in 2023 at the G2033, and is now being cleared by force while its architects describe it as a commercial response to the disruption.
The corridor was proposed before the wars. The bypass infrastructure was built before the closure. The regulatory framework was installed before the energy crisis. The commercial justification arrived right on schedule.
The position
Europe is being manoeuvred into dependency on a single energy corridor from the developing world34.
It cannot develop domestic fossil fuels because the stranded assets framework, developed at the Rothschild estate and installed through Basel 3.1, makes them impossible to finance. It cannot restore Russian supply because the infrastructure has been physically destroyed. It cannot diversify through Iran because the United States and Israel are destroying it. It cannot route through Iraq because the Development Road is stalled and Basra is trapped behind a closed strait.
What remains is IMEC — a corridor that runs through Israel, clears through a digital settlement layer, and operates on standards that no European electorate was asked to approve.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the corridor ‘nothing less than historic’ at the 2023 G20 signing35, and in February 2025 committed to ‘undertake concrete steps for its realisation’, linking it to the EU’s Global Gateway programme36. France appointed the first special envoy to IMEC of any country, in February 2024, with Marseille as its candidate terminal port37. Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni appointed a special envoy in April 2025 and has integrated the corridor into her Mattei Plan38, with Trieste as Italy’s candidate terminal.
Germany signed the original memorandum of understanding and is connecting IMEC to the Three Seas Initiative39 for Central and Eastern European infrastructure40. The EU-India free trade agreement, signed in January 2026, was described by von der Leyen as ‘the mother of all deals’41.
These are the same leaders whose regulatory architecture installed the stranded assets framework that prevents European domestic energy development, whose foreign policy supported the Ukraine strategy that severed Russian gas, and whose governments declined to oppose the war that closed the Strait of Hormuz.
The corridor is a clearinghouse. It sits between producer and consumer, checks whether the transaction meets the conditions, and processes or blocks accordingly. The conditions are environmental, financial, and regulatory — written into the infrastructure itself through programmable compliance, carbon accounting, and ESG metrics that determine what qualifies for financing and what does not.
Whoever wrote those conditions does not need to own the corridor or operate it. They need only to have set the parameters by which it clears. The power belongs to whoever calibrated the standards. The responsibility will be accepted by nobody — especially not the European politicians who enabled the situation.
Europe, having been guided into dependency by the convergence of war, regulation, and the systematic elimination of every alternative, will pay the toll — not in tariffs, but in compliance with conditions it did not set, on infrastructure it does not control, through a node it cannot bypass.
In 1932, the Fabian-linked organisation Political and Economic Planning published a pamphlet titled Freedom and Planning. It proposed decoupling distribution from production, installing an unelected planning authority between producer and consumer, and setting the standards by which goods would flow. The farmer would retain operational freedom over his fields. The quantities, the pricing, and the market access would be determined by a distribution authority he never voted for.
The pamphlet noted that of all Britain’s institutions, only one would require no structural change to fit the new order: the Bank of England.
Ninety-four years later the architecture is the same, but the scale is now global.
The distribution authority is a physical corridor. The standards are environmental, financial, and regulatory. And the institution that requires no change is the Bank for International Settlements — which published the unified ledger blueprint, calibrates the capital requirements, and built the settlement infrastructure through which the corridor will clear.
Lots of history, plans for ME oil to reach European markets overland, through Israel/Haifa.
https://ismi.emory.edu/documents/Readings/Bialer_Fuel_Bridge_Israeli_oil_pipline.pdf
https://gulbenkian.pt/biblioteca-arte/en/read-watch-listen/construction-of-the-iraq-mediterranean-oil-pipeline/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkuk%E2%80%93Haifa_oil_pipeline
https://wondersofworldengineering.com/oilroute.html
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Most-Crucial-Pipeline-Of-The-Middle-East.html
https://www.gem.wiki/Kirkuk%E2%80%94Haifa_Oil_Pipeline
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/apr/20/israelandthepalestinians.oil
https://www.nature.com/articles/134600c0
All of this infrastructure still remains in range of ballistic missiles however. This scenario relies on total subjugation of the Middle East which doesn't seem to be going according to plan. War never does...