Who Depends On Gulf Energy Trade?

In 2024, importers around the world bought about $2,658 billion of crude oil, refined petroleum, and natural gas, measured as bilateral goods trade. Of that, roughly $698 billion — about 26.3% -- came from just eight Gulf source countries: Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

A one-in-four global share already signals concentration. But the global average hides enormous variation. Some economies draw a clear majority of their oil and gas from the Gulf; others barely touch it. That spread is the real story, because a disruption to Gulf supply — for any reason — would land on importers very unevenly.

This article uses one specific, measurable lens: how much of each importer’s oil and gas comes from Gulf source countries. That is a fact in the trade record. It is not a claim about how those cargoes travel. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway most associated with Gulf energy, is a routing question this dataset cannot answer. We keep the measured exposure and the route question strictly apart throughout.

On the supply side, the Gulf is not a single undifferentiated block. Measured by 2024 exports of the eight oil and gas products in scope, Saudi Arabia is the largest source at about $221.3 billion, followed by the United Arab Emirates ($175.3 billion) and Iraq ($107.2 billion). Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman each ship tens of billions more.

At the other end, Iran records only about $0.9 billion of in-scope oil and gas exports in this dataset. That figure should be read with care: BACI is a reconciliation of reported bilateral trade, and sanctioned or under-reported flows are systematically undercounted. The number reflects what is recorded, not necessarily what physically moves. We flag this rather than smooth it over.

The practical point for importers is that 'Gulf exposure’ is really exposure to a handful of large, mostly Arabian-peninsula suppliers. That matters for any re-sourcing discussion: alternatives within the Gulf are limited, because the bulk of the supply is already concentrated in two or three countries.

Ranking importers by Gulf-source share — among economies that bought at least $2 billion of in-scope oil and gas in 2024, a threshold that keeps trivially small importers from topping the list on a tiny base -- Pakistan sits first at 88.6% of its oil and gas imports, roughly $15.1 billion of $17.0 billion. For a major economy, sourcing nearly nine in ten fuel dollars from one region is unusually concentrated.

Among the largest energy importers, the dependence is also high: Japan at 59.1%, Rep. of Korea at 58.7%, Thailand at 53.5%, India at 51.1%, and South Africa at 48.7%. India’s share translates into the largest absolute figures of this group: about $92.6 billion of Gulf-source oil and gas out of $181.2 billion total.

A few smaller East African importers also show high shares -- Kenya (74.9%) and Uganda (71.0%) -- a reminder that exposure is not only a story about industrial giants. One row, 'Other Asia, nes' (the BACI aggregate code S19, commonly used as a proxy for Taiwan), appears at about 44.1%; we keep and label it exactly as the source does rather than reassign it. Throughout, share is a measured origin fact, not a routing claim.

Share alone can mislead. A country can depend heavily on the Gulf in percentage terms while buying modest volumes, or buy enormous volumes while keeping its Gulf share moderate. Plotting import scale against Gulf share separates the two.

China is the clearest example. Its Gulf-source share is 41.1% -- below the headline leaders — yet in absolute terms it buys about $174 billion of Gulf oil and gas, out of roughly $423 billion of total in-scope imports. That is the largest absolute Gulf-source bill of any importer in the data, even though China is more diversified by share than Pakistan, Japan, or Korea. A disruption framed only as 'percentage dependence’ would understate the sheer tonnage involved for large, diversified buyers.

Across the 94 importers above the $2 billion threshold, the cloud spreads from high-share, lower-volume buyers like Pakistan toward high-volume, moderate-share buyers like China and India. Both corners describe real exposure; they just describe different kinds of exposure, which is why the next section keeps absolute value and share side by side.

Breaking the eight products into four groups shows that 'Gulf energy dependence’ is really several different dependencies. The Gulf’s largest measured footprint is in crude petroleum: about $478 billion of imports, 36.5% of all crude trade in scope. Crude is where the chokepoint conversation is usually centered, and the data supports that emphasis.

Refined petroleum is more diversified: the Gulf supplies about $141 billion, or 16.4% of refined trade, because refining capacity is spread across many more countries. LNG and other liquefied gases sit in between at 24.9% (around $78 billion), reflecting Qatar's large LNG role alongside non-Gulf exporters.

Gaseous (pipeline) natural gas is the outlier: the Gulf supplies only about 0.1% of it. Pipeline gas is inherently regional, so Gulf sources barely register in cross-border piped-gas trade. The lesson is that a Gulf supply problem would propagate very differently through crude markets than through piped gas — and that lumping all 'energy’ together would blur exactly the distinction that matters.

This section is an illustrative scenario, not a forecast. It does not model prices, volumes, substitution, or shortages, and it makes no claim about the Strait of Hormuz. It simply asks a bounded what-if: if Gulf-source oil and gas were delayed, how much purchasing would each importer have to find elsewhere? The answer is just the measured 2024 Gulf-source import value, re-labeled as exposure.

By absolute value at stake, **China is most exposed — about $174 billion of Gulf-source oil and gas would need re-sourcing — followed by India (~$93 billion), Rep. of Korea (~$84 billion), and Japan (~$81 billion). By share, the most exposed are economies like Pakistan (88.6%), where there is simply less non-Gulf supply already in the mix to lean on.

Reading the two together is the point. A large, diversified buyer faces a big absolute re-sourcing task but has more existing alternative suppliers; a smaller, concentrated buyer faces a smaller dollar figure but a thinner cushion. What this does not tell you is whether any such delay would occur, how markets would price it, or whether the cargoes in question move through any particular waterway. Those questions require a dedicated energy-market and logistics model, which this trade dataset is not.

Every value here is computed from CEPII BACI HS92 bilateral trade for 2024. The measured layer is each importer’s oil and gas purchases by source country, across eight HS6 product codes (crude 270900; refined 271000; LNG and liquefied gases 271111, 271112, 271113, 271119; gaseous gas 271121, 271129). Gulf-source share is the value from the eight Gulf source countries divided by the importer’s total in-scope imports of those same products.

The proxy layer is the interpretive leap from source country to chokepoint risk. Source-country origin is not the same as transit route: Gulf oil and gas can move by pipeline or via sea lanes other than the Strait of Hormuz, and the dataset never observes a vessel or a strait. We therefore call this a source-country exposure proxy, not a route measurement.

The context layer is external. The U.S. Energy Information Administration characterizes the Strait of Hormuz as the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint; that informs why Gulf exposure is worth examining, but it is editorial context kept separate from the BACI numbers. Standard caveats apply: BACI codes can differ from ISO numeric codes; the product history is HS92-compatible; sanctioned flows (notably Iran) may be undercounted; and 'Other Asia, nes’ (S19) is retained and labeled as the source does. No figure in this article was reasoned out — each one comes from a committed, re-runnable query.