WASHINGTON, Aug. 18 -- When Scott Bessent told reporters last week that underground pipelines could handle "more than 50% or 70%" of the oil exports now running through the Strait of Hormuz, markets briefly exhaled. The arithmetic sounded manageable. Engineers reviewing the actual construction requirements are rather less optimistic.

Rebuilding the Iraq-Syria pipeline corridor that would make such rerouting possible would cost at least $15 billion and take four years from the start of construction, according to analyses cited in Sputnik International. The project would connect Iraq's southern and northern oil fields through a central hub in Haditha, in western Iraq, and then run west across Syrian territory to the Mediterranean port of B...