Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani who visited Tehran on Wednesday underlined a plan between his country and Iran to dig a tunnel under the Persian Gulf which is hoped to expand connectivity between West Asia and the Caspian Sea all the way to the Mediterranean.

According to The Iran Project, The idea of building what would be the world’s longest tunnel featured first during late Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi’s visit to Qatar in February 2022. At the time, it was said that the project would only go ahead once a joint Qatari-Iranian committee finished studies and negotiations on the project.

In his meeting with Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the Qatari emir stated that the committee on the project will soon be activated, indicating how serious the emirate is about bringing the ambition project to fruition.

The tunnel starting from the northern tip of the Qatari peninsula will stretch around 190 kilometers to the Iranian coast near Dayyer. That is around three times more than the current longest transport tunnel in China, a 68 km section of the Chengdu metro.

It would also be five times further than the longest undersea tunnel which connects France and the UK through the Channel Tunnel for a length of 38 km. Built from 1988 to 1994, the Chunnel remains the most expensive construction project in history at a cost of $21 billion.

That said, the planned Iran-Qatar tunnel project would involve massive costs which, given Qatar’s annual income of some $ 200 billion from the sale of gas, could be accommodated despite Iran’s economic struggles in the face of sanctions.

For Qatar, the construction of the tunnel is a great achievement, through which it can access the Eurasian markets via Iran. Like other Arab countries, the small but wealthy country depends on the land route of Saudi Arabia to connect to different parts of the globe.