Satellite image of the Bab el-Mandeb, the strait that joins the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, taken by the ASTER instrument on 10 April 2017: dark open water betwee · NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team, via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

Study · YANBU · 2026-10-06 · 8 min read · Oil and shipping · Futures

Saudi pipeline hit again, one source says; others say oil flows

What changed since 24 September: the East-West line was running at more than 80 percent of its 7 million barrels a day late in the week to Friday 2 October, Bloomberg reported; on Monday 5 October an energy-sector source told AFP that a Sunday strike on a pumping station at Khurais had stopped it again, while a source told Reuters and people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that the oil still flowed; the Houthis claimed strikes on Riyadh's airport and the Rabigh refinery that Saudi Arabia had not confirmed; and Kpler counts Middle East crude exports above their pre-war 18 million barrels a day on four days of September's last week, with 40 percent now bypassing Hormuz.

By the desk. Researched and written by an AI model from the sources listed at the end; nothing here restates another publication's text.

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What changed since chapter two

Chapter two closed on Thursday 24 September with the East-West line pumping again after a stoppage that the commodity-tracking platform Kpler dates from 11 to 22 September, and with six ballistic missiles fired toward Taif and Yanbu, the line's terminal on the Red Sea, which Saudi Arabia said it had intercepted, reporting no damage to Aramco's sites. Since then the line has come most of the way back. By late in the week that ended Friday 2 October, Bloomberg reported, Aramco had raised the flow to more than 80 percent of the line's capacity of 7 million barrels a day, leaving about 4.5 million barrels a day for export once the refineries on the west coast had taken their share; Kpler said, in Reuters' report of Monday 5 October, that the surge in Gulf exports was driven by Saudi Arabia loading from both the Red Sea and the Gulf. Then, over the weekend of 3 and 4 October, attacks were reported at Riyadh and at Khurais, east of the capital. ^{[10, 12, 13, 17]}

On Saturday 3 October an AFP journalist saw flames and smoke rising from an Aramco facility south of Riyadh, and fire engines trying to put out a blaze at the company's Riyadh refinery, with ambulances and police vehicles nearby; the agency wrote that the circumstances remained unclear. The Houthis' military spokesman, Yahya Saree, said on X the same day that a 'military operation with ballistic missiles and drones' had targeted Aramco in Riyadh and 'led to fires breaking out', and the spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, Turki al-Maliki, called the Houthi claims of targeting Riyadh 'misleading'. On Sunday the Houthis said they had carried out two operations against Aramco facilities in Riyadh and in the Khurais area, in answer, they said, to Saudi air strikes and missile attacks in Yemen; AFP reported no immediate comment from the Saudi authorities or Aramco. ^{[11, 12, 10]}

On Monday 5 October a source working in the kingdom's energy sector told AFP that the line had been attacked again on Sunday: 'A pumping station east of Riyadh in Khurais. It wasn't targeted before. There was big damage and the pipeline stopped again.' The same day two other accounts contradicted it. A source told Reuters that flows through the pipeline had not been interrupted, and Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that the line was operating normally and that Aramco and the energy ministry had not immediately answered its requests for comment. Oil prices had risen as much as 1.2 percent on the first report and pared the gain after Bloomberg's, Anadolu Agency reported. ^{[10, 14, 13, 19]}

Later on Monday AFP reported explosions heard across Riyadh, and the Houthis said they had carried out three operations with drones and ballistic and cruise missiles against targets that included King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, the Aramco refinery in Rabigh, Abha airport and the Khamis Mushait military base, along with other sites in the kingdom's south. Their statement warned 'all global airlines using Saudi airspace against continuing their flights', except over Mecca and Medina. Reuters reported no immediate confirmation from Saudi Arabia. The foreign ministry's statement of the same day condemned the Houthis' 'blatant and repeated attacks' on Mecca, Medina, Riyadh, Abha, Khamis Mushait, Jazan, Najran, Taif and Yanbu, 'as well as its targeting of Saudi vessels in the southern Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait', and reaffirmed the kingdom's 'inherent right to defend its territory, resources, sovereignty, and the safety of its citizens and residents'. ^{[20, 19, 1]}

The record

The trackers' counts are the record of the flows. Kpler's provisional data, as Reuters reported it, put the Middle East's crude exports above their pre-war level on 24 September and from 27 to 29 September, at 19.5 to 22.5 million barrels a day, against an average of 18 million in the twelve months from March 2025 to February 2026; the seven-day average stood at 18.3 million on 30 September and 18.5 million on 1 October, and exports topped the pre-war level on 14 days of September. The count takes in cargoes through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, from terminals and from ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman, and it leaves out any ship that crossed with its automatic identification system, the transponder that broadcasts a ship's position, switched off. By Kpler's account, as Al Jazeera quoted it, '40 percent now bypass Hormuz, and most crude crossing the strait changes tankers offshore', much of it through the Saudi and Emirati pipelines. ^{[15, 17, 16]}

Aramco's chief executive, Amin Nasser, told the Energy Intelligence Forum in London on Monday, in what Reuters called his first in-person speech since the war began, that without the East-West line Brent crude futures would have hit 200 dollars a barrel; that the kingdom's maximum sustainable production capacity of 12 million barrels a day could be made available within days; and that Aramco was working on 'fourth and fifth' export routes, adding that 'multiple export routes, which can be adapted in real time, already reduce the risk that a single chokepoint can paralyse the system.' He counted almost 3 billion barrels of supply lost since the conflict began and 1 billion released from global stocks, and said that even after Hormuz fully reopens and confidence returns, 'replenishing inventories while meeting demand could take up to two years'. Sources told Reuters that Saudi Arabia is considering expanding the line's capacity; the Group of Seven had agreed on Friday to release 100 million barrels of diesel and crude from emergency reserves. At the same forum the chief executive of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, Shaikh Nawaf Al-Sabah, said it is studying pipeline routes including one from Kuwait into Oman through Saudi Arabia, Fox News reported with Reuters. ^{[14, 20]}

The notices of attacks on shipping kept coming. The British navy's UK Maritime Trade Operations centre, UKMTO, has logged at least one attack a day in the Strait of Hormuz or the Gulf of Aden since Friday 2 October, Reuters reported. On Monday alone it issued five notices for the Hormuz area, gCaptain counted: late reports of three tankers struck by unknown projectiles on 3 and 4 October, one of them an inbound tanker carrying liquefied petroleum gas; a fourth strike at 16:37 UTC on Monday, notice 156-26, which started a fire in a tanker's engine room; and an inbound tanker about 11 nautical miles north of Khasab, in Oman, that the Revolutionary Guards hailed and ordered to turn back or be targeted, and whose master complied. The Joint Maritime Information Center's update of 4 October counted four confirmed tanker attacks on 2 and 3 October, and said attacks were continuing along the Omani side of the strait. At the southern gateway to the Red Sea, UKMTO reported a possible attack on Sunday, multiple explosions close to a tanker south of Al-Mukha in the Bab el-Mandeb, with the crew reported safe, CBS News reported. ^{[17, 15, 18, 19]}

Two other pressures run through the same water. The United States' blockade of Iranian ports, which gCaptain noted targets ships entering or leaving those ports while neutral traffic through the strait remains permitted, redirected its 130th commercial vessel on Monday, counting from its resumption on 14 July; Central Command said its forces had also disabled three ships that refused to comply and destroyed 13 over the past 12 weeks that it said were violating the blockade or part of the Revolutionary Guards' shadow network. And Michelle Brohard, Kpler's head of policy and geopolitical risk, suggested in an interview that Gulf countries may be paying Iran to let their oil through: 'I suspect there is a toll that's being paid, which is giving these ships safe passage.' Al Jazeera noted that the claim has not been independently verified and that she presented it as speculation; in September the United States sanctioned a digital assets firm, BitBank, which it said Iran's Hormuz Safe Marine Services Authority, a body set up to collect fees for safe transit, had used to move money to Tehran. ^{[18, 16]}

The talks that chapter two found under way have not produced a document. The indirect talks between the United States and Iran on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly 'failed to produce a breakthrough', CBS News reported; President Trump rejected Tehran's conditions for reopening the strait while leaving the door open to more talks or renewed military operations, and Iran's deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, said on Sunday that the American views conveyed through intermediaries 'are currently being examined inside the country'. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker and Iran's top negotiator, said on Sunday that the strait would remain closed until the United States accepts Tehran's seven-day plan to reopen it, and on Monday President Masoud Pezeshkian called negotiations with the United States 'meaningless', the state news agency IRNA reported. ^{[19, 15]}

Who it reaches

Every path is adjacent: no company listed in the United States is named in the strikes. The companies' own reports for April to June show where the strait and the bypass reach them. Exxon Mobil counts 1,060 million dollars off its upstream earnings for the quarter from 'Middle East disruption impacts'. Chevron reports production curtailed in the Partitioned Zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and at assets of CPChem, its 50 percent-owned chemicals affiliate, in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and 'increased risks associated with lifting and transporting physical cargoes'. Valero, a refiner, lists 'use of alternative transportation routes that partially bypass the Strait of Hormuz' and coordinated releases from strategic petroleum reserves among what could ease crude supply disruptions: the bypass this series follows, and the kind of release the Group of Seven agreed on Friday. Frontline, a tanker owner, wrote in August that 'renewed attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have put pressure on the alternative route that handled much of the displaced Saudi Arabian volume and has left market players increasingly reluctant to transit Bab el-Mandeb'. ^{[7, 8, 6, 5, 14]}

The airlines meet the war in the air and in the fuel bill. Delta's announcement gives Friday 23 October as the first day of its Atlanta to Riyadh service, the first nonstop between the United States and Riyadh flown by an American airline, daily to 30 October and three times a week after that; Delta holds the webcast on its results for the September quarter on Friday 9 October. United reported in its quarterly report that conflicts in the Middle East 'caused disruption of flying in the region and contributed to materially higher global fuel prices', and that its aircraft fuel expense was 2.3 billion dollars, or 84.1 percent, higher in the second quarter than a year earlier. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency, whose bulletins advise European airlines and the foreign ones it authorises to fly to, from and within the EU, recommended on 30 September that they not operate in a part of Saudi airspace bounded by six navigation points and the edge of the Jeddah flight information region, the block of airspace that Saudi air traffic services cover, and that they exercise caution in the rest of it, citing Houthi strikes 'deeper inside Saudi territory, including in the Riyadh, Tabuk and Yanbu areas'. ^{[3, 4, 9, 2]}

Where the sources disagree

On the pipeline. One unnamed source in the Saudi energy sector told AFP that Sunday's strike at Khurais did big damage and stopped the line; an unnamed source told Reuters that the flow was not interrupted, and unnamed people told Bloomberg that the line was operating normally. None of the three reports carries a word on the strike from Aramco or the energy ministry, which had not immediately answered Bloomberg, and Bloomberg's figure of more than 80 percent of capacity describes the end of the week before the strike. Read together, the record holds a reported strike at a station that had not been targeted before and two accounts that the oil still flows; it does not yet hold the owner's word or a loading count for the days after. ^{[10, 14, 13]}

On the strikes. The Houthis claim strikes on Aramco in Riyadh and in the Khurais area, on the airport and on Rabigh, and the coalition's spokesman called their claims of targeting Riyadh 'misleading'; the reports of his remarks do not address the blaze that AFP's journalist saw at the Riyadh refinery, whose circumstances AFP called unclear. For Monday, the explosions in Riyadh rest on AFP's report and the strikes on the airport and on Rabigh on the Houthis' word alone, and Reuters reported no immediate Saudi confirmation; the foreign ministry's statement names Riyadh and Yanbu among the cities attacked but neither the airport nor Rabigh. No statement on the airport from the General Authority of Civil Aviation was found by the time of writing. ^{[12, 11, 10, 20, 19, 1]}

On the flows. Kpler counts the region's crude above its pre-war level on four days of September's last week and on 14 days of the month, through every outlet including the Red Sea; Vortexa, another tracker, puts the 14-day average of Middle East crude and condensate exports at 18.6 million barrels a day, back to pre-conflict levels; the Revolutionary Guards commander Ali Fadavi said on Sunday that only three to four million barrels a day travel along the route the United States supervises, a figure for one route set against Kpler's for all of them. Kpler's count leaves out ships that sail with their transponders off, and the toll that its own analyst suspects is unproven: 'No public proof confirms a systematic, state-run Iranian toll system,' Abdul Khalique, head of the Liverpool John Moores University Maritime Centre, told Al Jazeera. Even the price is told three ways for Monday: Brent around 100 dollars a barrel by CBS News, about 101.59 by Al Jazeera and around 102 by Reuters; the desk repeats each as reported and measures none. ^{[15, 17, 16, 19, 14]}

What settles it next

The dated records still to come. Delta's results for its September quarter, discussed on a webcast on Friday 9 October, a quarter that holds the pipeline's stoppage of 11 to 22 September. Delta's first flight from Atlanta to Riyadh on Friday 23 October. The European aviation agency's bulletin, which runs to 16 November unless it is reviewed earlier. And the records that have no date yet: a word from Aramco or the energy ministry on Khurais, which had not answered Bloomberg; Kpler's count of loadings on the Red Sea for the first days of October; the answer Tehran is preparing to the American views that its deputy foreign minister says are being examined; and the next notices from UKMTO. The next chapter opens with what those documents changed. ^{[4, 10, 3, 2, 13, 17, 19, 18]}

Sources

Every stock is a company; the desk grades the company behind the stock. This article describes; it does not recommend. Adjacent means the company is not named in the event and the path by which it is reached is stated above.

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