What follows is an attempt to map a plausible near-term scenario around a Hormuz agreement, and to examine what it would actually mean beneath the headline. The speculative elements are signalled as such. The structural realities that underpin them are not speculation. Nobody is going to get everything they want, and some parties are going to get none of what they want.
An agreement between the U.S. and Iran is inevitable at some point. The quality and longevity remain the biggest uncertainties, but the window for the imperfect, headline-grabbing, domestically palatable deal is narrowing and suggests a degree of imminence. Washington needs oil prices lower. Tehran needs sanctions relief and a non-aggression framework it can present domestically as the fruit of forty days of resistance.
The resolution that will emerge will see tankers moving, crude prices falling, a nuclear commitment sufficiently ambiguous to satisfy both sides, a Trump narrative of maximum pressure vindicated. What gets called a resolution will be accurate in its narrowest sense and potentially misleading over a medium-term horizon.
Before any formal agreement is announced, the immediate sticking point is tolls. Iran requires some form of revenue from Hormuz transit as a tangible deliverable, both to fund the reconstruction of badly damaged infrastructure and to underpin any framework Tehran can credibly present at home. This is not a peripheral negotiating point. It is the precondition for any deal.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has become an obstacle to such a deal by articulating public opposition, stating that toll-based transit does not constitute an open strait. That position may require some walking back, and any such repositioning would be an important signal to watch. The diplomatic architecture being constructed around Pakistan and Oman exists in part to provide cover for a retreat from previous red lines. A toll arrangement jointly managed and shared between Iran and Oman is considerably more palatable to Washington than naked Iranian unilateral control over the world’s most critical shipping lane. Oman’s participation provides the multilateral veneer that would make any repositioning from Rubio’s current narrative survivable in terms of credibility.
The consequences of delay are already visible. Today the United Arab Emirates announced its decision to exit OPEC, nine weeks into the conflict, citing its strategic and economic long-term plan. The market reaction was instructive. Brent briefly pared gains before recovering, a recognition that with Hormuz functionally closed, any UAE production increase reflects intent rather than immediate capability. But the more significant signal is not the barrels. It is what the decision reveals about the state of trust and cohesion within the producer bloc. Countries are beginning to make narrowly self-interested strategic decisions rather than waiting for collective frameworks to resolve the situation. That disposition, once established, tends to persist. In a normalised environment it would foreshadow lower prices. In the current one it speaks to something more consequential, a fracturing of the coordinated producer behaviour that has underpinned the price structure of the past several years, and a willingness to act unilaterally that will not be easily reversed when the crisis eventually passes.
One plausible scenario that would further soften a tolling proposal managed by the two gatekeeping nations of the strait would see Qatar committing to direct its share of toll revenues into chokepoint diversion infrastructure, pipeline capacity and port development that reduces long term Hormuz dependence for liquid hydrocarbons. This would give Washington something to point at in terms of an improved regional outcome: reduced vulnerability, allied investment, a transitional framework rather than a permanent concession.
That framing, while alluring, obscures a series of important structural realities. Bypass infrastructure does not touch the dependencies that are in some respects more strategically consequential than crude itself, precisely because they have no bypass solution whatsoever. Oman faces a mediation role that its traditional neutrality was specifically designed to avoid. And the yuan-denominated toll payments that have been quietly accumulating are not a footnote to the conflict. They represent a material evolution in Gulf energy settlement architecture whose implications will outlast the crisis considerably.
The bypass infrastructure story is real and partially credible. The Yanbu terminal on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast provides a meaningful alternative export route for Saudi crude. The Habshan to Fujairah pipeline in the UAE can move approximately 1.5 million barrels per day, well short of full UAE export capacity but a genuine operational alternative. Oman’s Duqm port on the Indian Ocean coast is already positioned as a transshipment hub that bypasses the strait entirely. The physical infrastructure exists or is buildable, and the investment case for accelerating it is real. It is a sufficiently coherent story, and one that has been openly discussed for some time in the context of reducing Iranian chokepoint leverage over time.
However, it is also incomplete in ways that are likely to be convenient to ignore in the short term, should this be the shape a deal takes. Pipelines and ports solve the liquid hydrocarbon problem to a meaningful degree. They do not touch sulphur, helium, or the Gulf’s aluminium production base, none of which can be pumped around a chokepoint or rerouted through a Red Sea terminal.
Sulphur moves in bulk carriers and the Gulf’s position as a dominant global supplier is a function of its hydrocarbon production geography, not its port infrastructure. There is no rerouting mechanism that changes the fundamental picture. Gulf sulphur production is where it is, the markets that need it are where they are, and the only maritime exit is Hormuz. The disruption to sulphur supply flowing through to global fertiliser and industrial chemical supply chains is a Hormuz-dependent reality regardless of how much pipeline capacity Qatar chooses to fund.
Helium is structurally even more constrained. Qatar accounts for approximately one third of global helium production, extracted as a byproduct of LNG processing at Ras Laffan. It moves in specialist cryogenic ISO containers, each worth approximately one million dollars, capable of storing liquid helium for only 35 to 48 days before pressure release venting begins. Approximately 200 of these containers are currently stranded in the Middle East. The infrastructure damage at Ras Laffan is measured in years of repair. Spot helium prices have already doubled, and the lag effect on long-term contract pricing has not yet fully materialised. No pipeline or port investment addresses any part of this.
The Gulf aluminium production base presents another direct dependency. Gulf smelters represent approximately 20 percent of global aluminium supply outside China. Whatever the domestic gas cost advantage those smelters enjoy, their finished products move by sea through Hormuz to reach end consumers. A tolling framework applies to that cargo as directly as it applies to any other seaborne export. It also introduces a structural cost disadvantage relative to producers outside the strait whose export routes carry no such imposition. That competitive pressure persists for as long as the tolling architecture remains in place.
The cumulative picture is one of leverage that operates across semiconductor supply chains, defence manufacturing inputs, fertiliser production, and industrial metals simultaneously. The United States gets its headline. Iran gets something considerably more durable. The bypass infrastructure framing will succeed in obscuring that gap, at least in the short-term news coverage cycle.
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