The recent disruption to Saudi Arabia’s East West Pipeline is a useful reminder of why that question matters.
When a major evacuation route is suddenly constrained or unavailable, the immediate issue is not simply whether another route exists. The real question is whether the business has tested what happens next.
How long can production continue before storage becomes constrained? What alternative evacuation capacity is genuinely available? Can the product meet the quality requirements of another route? Which customer nominations and contractual commitments are affected? What are the transportation and tariff implications? At what point does continuing production become commercially less attractive than curtailment?
These are business and commercial continuity questions.
And they should be tested before the disruption occurs.
A credible continuity exercise should go beyond confirming that another pipeline, terminal or transport option exists. It should model what would actually happen if the primary route were unavailable for 24 hours, three days, a week or longer.
Consider a relatively simple scenario.
- Route A has capacity, but introduces a product quality constraint.
- Route B protects a critical customer commitment, but at a materially higher transportation cost.
- Route C uses available storage, allowing production to continue temporarily, but creates a defined point at which production must be curtailed.
The important question is not whether those three options exist.
It is whether the organisation has already tested how it would choose between them.
That requires operations, commercial, logistics, scheduling and hydrocarbon management teams to work from the same assumptions and understand the consequences of each decision.
Scenario modelling can make that testing far more meaningful. Capacity, inventory, quality, nominations, contractual commitments, tariffs and revenue exposure can be assessed together rather than in isolation.
The selected scenario then needs to be executable.
Hydrocarbon management platforms such as EnergySys , and the wider operational systems around them, need to reflect the chosen arrangement so that movements, measurement, allocation, inventory, custody transfer, settlement and reporting continue correctly as operations change.
That is why business continuity testing in our industry needs to extend beyond traditional IT disaster recovery.
Recovering the system is essential.
But so is knowing what you are going to ask that system to do when the physical and commercial reality of the business has changed.
The East West Pipeline disruption is therefore not just an operational event. It is a reminder that resilience depends on more than having alternative routes available.
The real test is whether the business has rehearsed the operational and commercial decisions it would need to make on day one.
A continuity plan should not simply document the alternatives.
It should prove that the business is ready to use them.