Christopher Bean

The Houthis just reignited the Middle East oil crisis. This could be one of the biggest actions of the conflict so far, and one that American consumers feel at home within days. They've just claimed they hit the two remaining things that have kept Saudi oil flowing throughout this war: • Pumping stations on the East-West pipeline • Aramco's Abqaiq plant, the biggest oil processing site on the planet With Iran choking off the Strait of Hormuz, that pipeline is Saudi Arabia's escape hatch. It runs 1,200 km across the desert to the Red Sea port of Yanbu and can move up to 7M barrels a day without going anywhere near the Gulf. Abqaiq is where most Saudi crude gets processed before it ships. The last time it was hit, in 2019, Saudi output was cut in half overnight and oil jumped almost 15% in a single day. Now both are in the firing line at the same time. The Houthis also said they went after Riyadh's main airport and its financial district. They already hit that district on Sunday, when debris tore into several floors of the Aramco Tower. That makes three days in a row of strikes on Saudi energy. Sunday was the Aramco Tower. Monday brought a fire on the same pipeline near Medina. Today it's Abqaiq. Saudi Arabia has played down every attack so far, and nobody has confirmed today's damage yet. But the Houthis keep coming back to the same targets, and Saudi oil has no other big route around Hormuz. Assuming this announcement is true, the world loses the barrels it's been counting on to get through this war. This could change the tide of the fuel markets dramatically.