A LATTER-DAY RED BALL EXPRESS?

A report describing Syria's attempt at geographic arbitrage, giving local teamsters a slice of the Hormuz maritime risk premium, opens with a photograph.

Unattributed photograph retrieved from Yahoo News.

Entrepreneurial alertness, only an air raid warning away.

Day and night, 5,000 hulking trucks carrying oil from the Persian Gulf rumble across this stretch of barren desert as if in a caravan snaking its way toward the Mediterranean Sea.

The trucks began shuttling between the refineries of southern Iraq and the Syrian port of Baniyas in April, initially as an experiment by Iraqi oil exporters seeking to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz after cargo traffic in the waterway was stopped by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

Today, the daily bumper-to-bumper procession of tanker trucks is a showcase of how Syria and its new government aim to benefit as global energy flows are reshaped.

More than 18 months after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, who fled after 24 years in power, Syria is poised to capitalize on the lifting of international sanctions and the continuing war in the Persian Gulf.

Boasting access to Europe through its Mediterranean port at Baniyas, Syria - under its new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa - is pitching itself as a relatively stable, overland corridor for energy and goods, and an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz.

I have trouble thinking of Syria under any president (perhaps Belshazzar or Augustus in charge would change my mind) as a "relatively stable" anything, even with (there are likely people who would change that to "especially with") Trumpian interests venturing money to build a pipeline to take over for the Red Ball Express.

The 1,000-mile, $5.7 billion pipeline will take at least two and a half years to build and cannot fully replace the seaborne cargo vessels that transit the strait. But in the long term, it would allow oil exporters to diversify delivery routes after the war exposed the world's dependence on the strait and sent energy prices soaring.

Still, investing in Syria is fraught with risk. While the country is mostly peaceful, Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda-linked militant, has not fully consolidated control over the country. Islamic State cells continue to carry out sporadic bombings. And a pipeline would have to pass through western Iraq, an area largely dominated by Iran-backed militias.

"The delivery of physical security for any kind of pipeline infrastructure is going to be the number one challenge," said Gabriel Mitchell, an energy specialist and visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund, the Washington-based policy institute.

"This is a pipeline that'll be vulnerable to militant attacks, but it's a 30-year investment," Mitchell said. "Who will be guaranteeing security? How can you get coverage in terms of insurance? What if the war ends in the Strait of Hormuz and international oil companies think, 'Now that the strait is open, we don't need to make that investment?'"

Make of it what you will that none of those analysts raised the possibility of remnants of the mullahs' tyranny flipping one of their flying gas mains at the truck terminals or the pipeline construction or  any critical bridges or tunnels along this rudimentary road.

There is something desperate about using vehicles powered by petroleum products to haul crude oil.

Gen^l Sherman's maxim, "No army dependent on wagons can operate more than a hundred miles from its base because the teams going and coming consume the contents of their wagons" has a corollary when it's a motorized army and the gasoline is being delivered from refineries an ocean away.

I've never understood fully the chemistry of fractionating crude oil. Put simply, not all crudes can as easily be cracked either into gasoline or lighter diesel fuels.  A big rig, however, offers a trucker a more favorable business proposition than a photo I saw a few months ago, purportedly out of Iran, showing all sorts of pickup trucks with barrels or small tanks in the bed clustering at the border with Pakistan.  "Consuming the contents of the wagons" indeed as those barrels in the bed might not yield enough light distillates to fill the truck's fuel tank.

Getting those rigs across Syria remains fraught, with many of the same challenges that a camel caravaner who properly understood the limits of Roman imperial power would encounter.

Mohammad Hatem, a gregarious Iraqi driver hauling oil, complained about a different set of problems.

Syria's potholed roads are in pitiful shape compared to Iraqi highways and chew up his tires, Hatem said, his rig parked near a desert intersection. And so many trucks now shuttle oil between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean that accidents are a daily occurrence, he said.

Still, he wasn't complaining about the $1,800 he pockets for each 10-day round-trip from Basra to Baniyas.

I remember from the days of DESERT STORM a "Tapline Road," which the oil companies built alongside the Trans-Arabian Pipeline across Saudi Arabia.  If the Red Ball Express is temporary, until either the pipelines are expanded or freedom of navigation resumes in the Gulf, there's little reason for the well operators or the ports to upgrade the roads, let alone contemplate a railroad.