Redan, I considered that possibility, but the text gives no hint of it: “Egypt…will remain in the news…as it struggles to…feed[] 84 million people a day…and guard[] the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 percent of the world’s entire trade every day.” “World’s entire trade” clearly suggests trade of oil and non-oil alike, and the later 2.5-percent figure of the world’s oil trade through the Suez Canal is given as a specific elaboration.

Strictly speaking, U.S. EIA’s report aggregates the SUMED pipeline with the Suez Canal, whereas the author makes no mention of the pipeline. Nevertheless, the author mentions the Suez Canal in the context of “an Islamist [sic] insurgency” and the “guarding” of the Canal therefrom, and one may reasonably assume that the security profile of the Canal and the pipeline are similar: whoever controls one is extremely likely to control the other.

Per U.S. EIA’s Three important oil trade chokepoints are located around the Arabian Peninsula (August 4, 2017), in 2016, “3.9 million b/d of crude oil and refined products transited the Suez Canal in both directions”, and “1.6 million b/d of crude oil [were] transported through the SUMED Pipeline to the Mediterranean Sea and then loaded onto tankers for seaborne trade”. Inferentially, the SUMED pipeline accounts for about two-fifths, and the Suez Canal accounts for about three-fifths, of oil transit through Egypt. In the same year, per U.S. EIA’s World Oil Transit Chokepoints (July 25, 2017), world total oil supply was 97.2 million b/d, such that about 3.4 percent passed through the Suez Canal, about 2.3 percent passed through the SUMED pipeline, and about 5.7 percent passed through both in the aggregate.

It isn’t clear why the author chose to mention the oil transit of the Suez Canal without mentioning that of the SUMED pipeline. Perhaps he does so later in his work.

Would ’2.5% of world’s entire trade’ and ’8% of world’s oil’ fit?