Despite rising gasoline prices and the painful, deadly effects of war in the Middle East, the struggle in bone-dry deserts to keep oil flowing continues.
And that includes some resilient efforts that are easily overlooked, like workers who've braved the stifling desert heat to repair bombed-out pipelines and refineries.
State-hired workers in Saudi Arabia braved 115-degree heat last week as they worked to repair a key pipeline that delivers oil, bypassing the now-bottlenecked Strait of Hormuz, piping the crude east to the Red Sea, which is still open.
The awaiting tanker ships, when full, steam down the Red Sea to open water and into the Arabian Sea, bypassing the warzone that the Hormuz has become.
But does bypassing the strait really do much good?
"Certainly, every little bit does some good, and the pipeline [known as the East-West PIpeline] is much more than a little bit," says one expert.
The pipeline delivers about 7 million barrels of oil per day to the worldwide marketplace, or about 7-percent of the daily worldwide use of oil.
Yes, the world needs about 102 million barrels of oil each day to run the world just the way we're used to it today. Any less oil available and people will have to start adjusting their lifestyles because of the higher prices of gasoline and products made using oil -- which is most everything, including solar panels and wind turbines, hydropower and nuclear power systems and materials.
Patrick De Haan of GasBuddy, an online platform and mobile app that helps drivers find the best gasoline and diesel prices nationwide, tracks the trends in oil and gasoline markets and specializes in explaining them to consumers, and he says losing that 7-million barrels the pipeline delivers would have meant big trouble, possibly sending gas prices even higher.
Gas prices seem to have levelled off for now and even dropped in recent days in some areas, but De Haan says that's certainly subject to change.
"Y'know, things could change down the road. Any escalation could suddenly and abruptly cause oil prices to shoot back up.
There is also some concern about the ability of the West Texas oil fields to meet all the demands placed on it during these times of strained oil markets.
It can take weeks or months to turn on oil wells that have been shut off, so there might even be a relatively short period soon that might be termed -- dare we say it? -- an energy crisis?