Saudi Arabia Reroutes Oil Exports As Houthi Strikes Target Yanbu

Satellite images gathered by Bloomberg show supertankers with capacity for 14 million barrels at Saudi Arabia’s Gulf export terminals over the weekend, the highest tanker count observed since at least June, according to data compiled from the European Union’s Sentinel-2 satellite.

However, as OilPrice notes, overall Hormuz traffic kept falling over the same weekend, nonetheless. Just a dozen commodity vessels crossed the strait, down from 35 a week earlier, and Thursday’s crossings totaled four tankers against a 10-day moving average of 16, Kpler data cited by Reuters showed.

Saudi Arabia moved crude through the strait at 2.9 million barrels a day over the past six days, JPMorgan said in a Friday note, calling the kingdom’s shift “the most notable pivot” among Gulf producers.

On September 11, drone strikes launched from Iraq shut down Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, also known as Petroline, which normally carries as much as 7 million barrels a day across 1,200 kilometers from Eastern Province fields to the Yanbu terminal on the Red Sea. The attack took 4-5 million barrels a day of that capacity offline, with total Saudi crude loadings falling from 7.5 million bpd in January and February to about 2.1 million barrels a day by mid-September, a decline of more than 70%.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said September 15 the pipeline would restart within days, but an industry analyst told Al-Monitor pump stations were destroyed in the strike and full restoration could take six weeks or more.

Yemen’s Houthi movement claimed cruise missile, ballistic missile and drone strikes on Riyadh and on Aramco facilities at Yanbu overnight September 18-19, and Saudi Arabia confirmed the Houthis targeted civilian infrastructure at the port where the East-West pipeline terminates. The Riyadh missile was intercepted and Saudi authorities reported no casualties or damage from either strike, but the attempt puts Yanbu, the kingdom’s primary outlet since the Hormuz freeze, under renewed threat.

Aramco pipes crude to its Ras Tanura terminal on the Persian Gulf, ships it on smaller vessels to the Gulf of Oman, and transfers it to larger tankers there, a routing it is using to move about 60 million barrels loaded at Ras Tanura for September and October delivery, mainly to Chinese and South Korean refiners. Gulf exports have rebounded to an average of 1 million to 1.5 million barrels a day, roughly in line with August levels.