I don't think you realize how much water and power would be needed.
My back-of-the-envelope calculations says it needs the water of 30 Panama canals [1], in a region with very little water. It's possible to use seawater, but water is very expensive to pump, requiring the world's biggest power plant. You'll also have to build the world's tallest lock system, by far, with a dozen lockings, so passage will slow,
I can't even begin to calculate the cost of a sea-level canal.
[1] It looks like there are 36,000 transits of the strait per year, compared to under 14,000 for the Panama canal. The ships going through the strait are much larger than Panamax. The canal would be several times higher than the Panama canal. Each locking requires significant water. As a wild-ass guess, each is factor of 3, giving 27, which I rounded to 30.
That's about 60 billion cubic meters of water.
If I get it right, that's enough to cover the 310 km^2 of Oman with 20 cm of water, or since that water doesn't exist in the region, it's about 200 GW of continuous power to pump that water from sealevel - about 9x the power of the Three Gorges Dam, or 70 TW hours in annual electrical consumption - about that of Austria.
My back-of-the-envelope calculations says it needs the water of 30 Panama canals [1], in a region with very little water. It's possible to use seawater, but water is very expensive to pump, requiring the world's biggest power plant. You'll also have to build the world's tallest lock system, by far, with a dozen lockings, so passage will slow,
I can't even begin to calculate the cost of a sea-level canal.
[1] It looks like there are 36,000 transits of the strait per year, compared to under 14,000 for the Panama canal. The ships going through the strait are much larger than Panamax. The canal would be several times higher than the Panama canal. Each locking requires significant water. As a wild-ass guess, each is factor of 3, giving 27, which I rounded to 30.
That's about 60 billion cubic meters of water.
If I get it right, that's enough to cover the 310 km^2 of Oman with 20 cm of water, or since that water doesn't exist in the region, it's about 200 GW of continuous power to pump that water from sealevel - about 9x the power of the Three Gorges Dam, or 70 TW hours in annual electrical consumption - about that of Austria.