we were very very very lucky. If al quaeda had succeeded and destroyed the compound. We would have been looking at 100$ a barrel or greater right now. And the dow and nasdaq would have taken montrous dives, similiar to after 911. We were very lucky friday
Really? First, they were trucks, and if you recall Oklahoma City, a truck can take down a whole 6-10 floors building. Second, refineries are the bottleneck of the oilbusiness. If they can execute the attack on a strategically important part of the comlex, that can put out of business the whole refinery, and you can imagine what gasprice you gonna pay when next time you fill up your car....
dis yes it can. The insurgents in iraq are using explosives that can puncture reinforce bradley fighting vehicles. And each of the vans used left craters meters wide and the blast could be felt kilometers away. And remember car bombs were used to take down, the american embassies in africa, and in okahoma. Im surprise they didnt just fire a stinger missle or launch indirect fire into the facilitie.
Abqaiq is enormous and it's more than just a transfer point. They do water separation and treatment, gas recovery, hydrotreating, desulfurization, pumping, storage, etc. A very large bomb could certainly disrupt operations there but it wouldn't shut in a significant amount of Saudi production. To do that they'd need WMDs. As we've seen in Iraq there are much more vulnerable parts of the oil infrastructure - pipelines. That's where I'd expect the next round of attacks. Not nearly as dramatic but much more effective. Martin
sparohok, the car bombs if they actually struck the plant wouldnt themselves cause the most damage but secondary explosions. We are talking about a place that has hundreads of thousands of barrels of oil. If you remember almost a couple of months ago, there was an explosion in england in an oil refinary. The intial blast was small, in a small section of the plant, but it caused secondary explosions, that leveled the entire plant. But Sparohok like you said even if they dont completely shut down oil at Abqaiq, it could halt tranfers. If we we are talking about 30% shutin, even that would spook oil to levels not unheard of. We are talking about 30% of 6.8 million barrels a day.
I expect many did not listen to the reports properly, the 100 dollar figure being floated around is if Abqaiq in its ENTIRETY suddenly was not there. The facility is absolutely massive, it's like 2/3rds of Saudi output, to blow up something of that size would be close to impossible unless there was some chain reaction that successively closed down site after site. The Oklahoma bombing was just one building, there are hundreds in Abqaiq, granted many are low rise... So while I'm the one being squeezed on this position, I also know we were nowhere near going to 100 overnite