After the East–West Pipeline reopened on Sept. 22 following an 11-day drone shutdown, the author says Riyadh should not rush back to maximum exports: Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb still threaten delivery, and oil is a finite stock, not a crop.

The proposed shift is to cut exports toward about 2 million barrels a day and treat $250 a barrel as a “fair-value” benchmark of scarcity and risk—not a price Riyadh can decree. Ten million barrels at $50 and two million at $250 yield the same $500 million a day, while ~2.92 billion barrels a year stay in the ground.

Extra routes (a Mecca Pact–style land corridor via Jordan and Syria to Türkiye) should move smaller, higher-value volumes, not more cheap crude. The piece cites the 2022 $60 Russian cap and U.S. interest in Venezuelan heavy oil as reasons producers may plan for generations the way consumers already do. Market share, it argues, is a tool—not the goal.

The oil Saudi Arabia does not extract is not lost. Why lower extraction, deferred exports and resource sovereignty offer a safer path amid threats to Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb and the East–West Pipeline

Riyadh confronts a familiar paradox in a sharper form: full physical capacity to extract hydrocarbons paired with growing vulnerability across its principal export arteries. The East–West Pipeline resumed operations on 22 September after a drone attack had forced its closure for eleven days. Its reopening is welcome, but the disruption demonstrated that even the route designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz is not immune from attack. The Red Sea outlet, moreover, ultimately depends on secure passage through Bab el-Mandeb.

The instinctive response is to reopen the routes, repair the infrastructure and restore exports as quickly as possible. But is that the only option? Is it in the Kingdom’s interest simply to return to extracting very large volumes at a price that does not compensate us for depletion, risk and the permanent loss of a national asset?

Adversity often exposes the flaws in prevailing assumptions. The recent constraints on Saudi oil exports should therefore not be viewed solely as emergencies to be overcome at any cost. They can instead provide the right occasion for the Kingdom to reconsider the principles governing how much oil it extracts for export, when it brings that oil to market and what value it expects to receive in return.

We must stop mislabeling extraction as production. Crops are grown and goods are manufactured; crude oil is a finite, non-renewable asset drawn down from a subterranean stock. Treating a depletion event as standard manufacturing output invites underpricing. It is extracted from a finite stock formed over millions of years. Every barrel removed from the reservoir is a barrel that can never be replaced. When that barrel is sold too cheaply, increased extraction does not necessarily create additional wealth; it accelerates the consumption of irreplaceable national capital.

Global markets price extraction, logistics and refining, yet routinely fail to account for permanent resource depletion. They........

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