Saudi Arabia's crude production has returned to pre-attack levels of about 9.9 million barrels per day, and maximum sustained capacity of 12 million bbl/d could be restored before a target at the end of November, said the head of Saudi Arabian Oil Co., or Saudi Aramco.
"Considering the progress so far, we might even beat that target," Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said Oct. 9 at the Oil & Money conference in London.
The Sept. 14 attacks on the Abqaiq crude processing facility and the Khurais oil field took 5.7 million bbl/d of Saudi Arabia's production capacity offline.
Nasser said Khurais was back to operational within 24 hours after the attacks, and Abqaiq — the world's largest crude processing plant — was restarted on a partial basis within 48 hours. Production capacity stood at 11.3 million bbl/d 10 days after the attack, he added.
Crude prices spiked by about 20% in the immediate aftermath of the incident but have since given up those gains as Aramco and Saudi energy ministry officials have sought to calm market fears of an extended outage. "Everything worked like a clock," Nasser said. "We could have called a force majeure. But not a single shipment to our international customers was interrupted. Reliability continued. This is very important for us."
Yemen's Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels claimed the attacks. Saudi officials have said the attacks were sponsored by its longstanding geopolitical rival, Iran, which has denied involvement.
"This event offered further proof of how important oil and our industry remains for the global economy," Nasser said. "This means an absence of international resolve to take action might embolden the attackers and put the world's energy security at risk."
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