The world's largest oil processing facility has emerged as the next flashpoint in the Iran conflict, with potentially immediate consequences
Most people outside Saudi Arabia and the oil industry have probably never heard of Abqaiq. But it's where 7% of the world's crude oil is processed. Iran's Yemeni allies, the Houthis, have taken an interest in this facility. Seriously disrupting Abqaiq would send the price of gasoline soaring.
The Yemeni militant Houthi group says it’s targeting vital Saudi Arabian energy facilities – a situation that threatens to harden high gasoline prices at a precarious moment for Republicans ahead of the midterms. The Houthis’ target, according to Al Jazeera: Abqaiq, the world’s largest crude oil processing facility, which is responsible for stabilizing about 7 percent of the world’s crude oil. Many of its critical components are custom-built and irreplaceable on any short timeline. While blockades in the Strait of Hormuz have spiked oil and gasoline prices worldwide, there’s been enough slack in the global system to keep prices from going even higher. But much of that slack is now tapped, and hobbling a facility like Abqaiq would quickly send global oil and crude prices spiking, said Thomas Warrick, who served as deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism policy at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Trump’s first term and has visited Abqaiq. “Abqaiq is among the most important pieces of critical infrastructure on the planet,” said Warrick, who has called the facility the “Panama Canal” of global energy markets. “It ought to be one of the places on the planet that gets the most attention from security officials, economists, engineers, and technical people.”
Abqaiq sits atop an enormous oil field. It isn't so much a refinery as it is a processing center where crude is sorted before being exported.
The Houthis have already attacked Abqaiq in the past though damage has not been severe.
[T]he threats to Saudi infrastructure extend far beyond the region, said Michael Ratney, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the Biden administration. “It would be wrong to think it’s just a threat to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It builds risk into the system in a way that gets priced up, and eventually that turns into higher prices at the gas pump.”
Thomas S. Warrick at The Atlantic Council further explains the significance of Abqaiq.
What the Abqaiq attack should teach us about critical infrastructure
Abqaiq is not an oil refinery. Abqaiq is a gas-oil stabilization facility that is unique in the international oil and gas industry because of its function, location, and scale. Oil coming out of a wellhead is usually a “hydrocarbon soup” of molecules of hydrogen and carbon. The number of hydrogen and carbon atoms in each molecule determines whether the molecule is a gas, like the natural gas that cooks love to use, or that provides clean power to generate electricity. Cars rely on heavier hydrocarbons like gasoline, and still heavier hydrocarbons make up diesel fuel to power trucks and railroads. Still heavier hydrocarbons are turned into asphalt to pave our roads. Oil refineries take crude oil from tankers or pipelines and separate crude oil into its separate components for cooking, gas tanks, or highways. [ ... ] Just as the oil fields around Abqaiq are among the largest in the world, the gas-oil separators and other equipment at Abqaiq were also built on a larger scale than anywhere else in the world. Many of Abqaiq’s facilities such as their giant spheroids that tower over people as they drive by were custom-built to a very large scale and cannot be easily replaced—certainly not by any off-the-shelf replacements.
Trump got the US involved in a stupid war in an area he is utterly clueless about. There are good reasons why past presidents, even the hare-brained George W. Bush, did not get into wars with Iran.
A couple of lucky shots by the pro-Iran Houthis could spike the price of gasoline even higher as the midterm elections approach.
