Recent strikes on Iran by the United States and Israel have once again shown why the Strait of Hormuz is the world's most dangerous energy chokepoint. Before war disrupted shipping in the strait, nearly 20 million barrels of oil, or roughly a quarter of the world's total seaborne oil trade, passed daily through the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman. About 80 percent of the oil that passed through the strait was headed for Asia. In short: when Hormuz shakes, markets flinch.

For China, the disruption of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz is a significant factor in its comprehensive energy security strategy. In 2025, China imported a record 11.5 million barrels of crude oil daily, with about 40 percent of that oil sourced from the Gulf region and about a third of its LNG imports passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

But China is not without options. Beijing has created buffers and used its diplomatic influence to encourage stability in the region.

However, influence has limits when missiles are flying and shipping companies are constantly assessing risks. The lesson of Hormuz is straightforward: much of Asia's energy future still relies on oil tankers.

This is where the green energy cooperation between China and Middle East countries stops being a talking point about climate and becomes a hard geopolitical reality. The best insurance against a crisis like Hormuz is not only more escorts, higher insurance and larger storage tanks. It is reducing how much of the future depends on that chokepoint in the first place.

That shift is already visible across the Gulf. In Abu Dhabi, Al Dhafra shows how large-scale solar can deliver electricity without relying on vulnerable sea lanes.

In Saudi Arabia, Chinese firms such as JinkoSolar and TCL Zhonghuan have moved beyond exports to major manufacturing joint ventures, helping localize solar supply chains at an industrial scale. In the UAE, Masdar's co-investment agreement with China's Silk Road Fund points to the same trend.

The old energy bargain is evolving, with China and the Gulf no longer just a buyer and a seller, but increasingly co-investors in a lower-carbon future.

The logic is quite neat. The Gulf has abundant sunlight, land, sovereign capital and governments that now understand that oil wealth without post-oil planning is simply a countdown. China, meanwhile, brings the industrial ecosystem: solar panels, batteries, grid equipment and electrolyzers.

To put it simply: The Gulf has the sun while China has the supply chain for turning it into energy.

That complementarity is important because renewable energy is no longer an expensive flourish for climate summits. It is increasingly the cheapest option on the table.

Solar power is produced in the Gulf at highly competitive prices, and China's manufacturing scale can help drive costs down further. Hydrogen may be oversold in some places, but the broader logic remains compelling: pairing cheap Gulf renewables with Chinese industrial capacity could help build lower-carbon supply chains for power, desalination, heavy industry and shipping fuels.

Green cooperation, therefore, offers something the old oil relationship never could: diversification with depth. Every solar park, battery facility, hydrogen hub, or local manufacturing line reduces exposure not only to emissions pressure but also to missile strikes, blockades and freight panic.

A more renewable-heavy energy partnership will not erase geopolitics, but it can loosen the grip of one chokepoint over the shared future of two regions.

None of this makes green cooperation free of risks. In the Middle East, all infrastructure lives in the shadow of regional volatility. Solar fields, ports and transmission lines are not immune to war. Clean energy cannot insulate investors from instability any more than oil pipelines can. But what it can do is spread risk more intelligently. That means diversified financing through green bonds and sovereign funds, more localized manufacturing, and stronger contracts and arbitration mechanisms sturdy enough to survive the next shock.

The tankers waiting nervously outside Hormuz are sending a message no diplomat could put more bluntly: fossil-fuel dependence routed through a single chokepoint is not a strategy. It is vulnerability dressed up as one. China and the Middle East do not need to abandon oil tomorrow to understand that. They only need to recognize that the smartest response to Hormuz is not merely to defend the old energy order more aggressively. It is to build a new one more quickly.

The age of oil made Hormuz indispensable. The next era should be about making it less so.

Green-energy cooperation will not resolve the Gulf's politics. But gigawatt by gigawatt, corridor by corridor, it can reduce the economic costs of the next crisis. That is not idealism. It is realism, sharpened by sunlight.

The author is the founder of Mideast Strategia, a senior research fellow at GISR Doha and a senior associate research fellow at ISPI Milan.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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