Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s biggest oil producers, on Friday said it had shut down a vital oil pipeline as a precautionary measure following a drone attack from Iraqi territory.
The infrastructure, known as the East-West pipeline, is key to Saudi Arabia’s ability to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz — the Persian Gulf waterway that Iran blockaded after the U.S.-Israeli attack in late February, throttling global oil exports.
The targeting of the East-West pipeline showed that even alternatives to the strait can be disrupted if Iran and its proxies expand their attacks, exposing another vulnerability in efforts to restore the flow of oil to world markets and bring down energy prices.
Here is what you need to know about the pipeline.
What is the East-West pipeline?
Built in the 1980s — when the Iran-Iraq war was similarly squeezing oil exports from the Persian Gulf — the 1,201-kilometer (746-mile) pipeline crosses the Arabian Peninsula to the Saudi port of Yanbu on the Red Sea.
Earlier this summer, Yasir O. Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, said engineers had expanded the pipeline’s capacity to carry up to seven million barrels per day, nearly 30 percent more than before the war.
“We had a similar situation back in the ’80s where the Strait of Hormuz was threatened to be blockaded by the Iranian regime,” Mr. Al-Rumayyan said in June. “It was decided since then that we will have a pipeline from east to west and if it wasn’t for this pipeline, we wouldn’t have a lifeline for us as a Saudi economy.”
Still, Saudi Arabia’s oil exports fell last month to 3.2 million barrels a day, the lowest level in at least 13 years, according to data from Kpler, a maritime information company.
How important is it to the global oil supply?
The pipeline has allowed Saudi Arabia to mitigate the impact of the disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz by keeping oil flowing out through the Bab al-Mandab Strait, at the southern entry to the Red Sea.
But that backup route has come under threat as well.
