World’s largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia as well as a major oilfield operated by Saudi Aramco has been attacked by drones early on Saturday. The kingdom’s interior ministry confirmed the news, sparking an enormous fire at a processor vital to worldwide energy supplies.
Drones Hit 2 Major Saudi Arabia Aramco Oil Facilities
Right now, no one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, which comes among previous drone attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
It wasn’t clear that if there were any injuries in the attack on the processing plant in Buqyaq as well as at the Khurais oil field. Online videos seemingly shot in Buqyaq which comprised of the sound of gunfire in the background. After the attack, smoke rose over the skyline along with the glowing flames were able to be seen from a distance away.
Interior Ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Saudi Press Agency that the fires started after the locations were “targeted by drones,”
Aramco on the other hand did not instantly responded to the questions from The Associated Press.
The company also defines its Abqaiq oil processing facility in Buqyaq as “the largest crude oil stabilisation plant in the world.”
The main operation of the facility is to process the sour crude oil into sweet crude, then it later transports onto transshipment points on the Persian Gulf as well as the Red Sea. Some of the estimates suggest that it can process up to 7 million barrels of crude oil in a single day.
There was no instant effect on worldwide oil prices as markets were shut down for the weekend all around the world. Benchmark Brent crude had been trading at just more than USD 60 a barrel.
Buqyaq is about 330 kilometres (205 miles) northeast of the Saudi capital, named Riyadh.
A Saudi-led alliance has been fighting the Houthi movement in Yemen from March 2015. The Iranian-backed rebels hold the capital, Sana’a, as well as other territory in the Arab world’s poorest country.
The war has generated the one of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The violence has also pushed Yemen in order to the edge of famine as well as more than 90,000 people have been killed ever since the year 2015, as per to the US-based Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, which tracks the conflict.
This is not the first time but also, the plant has been targeted in the past by militants. Al-Qaida-claimed suicide bombers tried but on the other hand failed to attack the oil complex in the year 2006 (February).
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