Oil prices remained elevated on Wednesday, amid increasing attacks on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz and an escalation of fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis, an Iran-backed militia.
The Houthis, emboldened by regional instability, late Tuesday struck a building owned by the state-owned energy giant Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s energy ministry said, as Saudi and Houthi forces traded attacks. Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most important energy suppliers, has bombed Houthi positions in Yemen in support of the internationally recognized Yemeni government, which is fighting to retake territory seized by the Houthis.
At the same time, more ships were attacked in the Strait of Hormuz in the last week than in the entire month of September. More than 100 ships have been struck since the start of the war in Iran, now in its eighth month.
In Saudi Arabia, the Houthis over the weekend carried out the deadliest attack on the kingdom in more than a decade, striking King Khalid International Airport and killing at least 13 people and wounding more than 300.
The Houthi assault on the headquarters of Saudi Aramco, in Dhahran in the east of the kingdom on Tuesday, resulted in no casualties or injuries but caused a “limited fire,” the Saudi authorities said.
The strike damaged the office tower’s top three floors, according to two people with knowledge of the impact who spoke on condition of anonymity. No oil production or export infrastructure was damaged in the attack.
The global oil benchmark, Brent crude, was trading about 1 percent higher on Wednesday, a relatively modest rise that pushed the price above $106 a barrel. The global price was just under $70 a barrel on the eve of the war in late February.
“Given the attack did not impact oil operations, the market did not react,” said Amena Bakr, head of Middle East & OPEC+ Insights at Kpler, a maritime data firm.
Saudi Aramco is the world’s largest oil producer, and its headquarters — as well as a large residential community of employees — has been in Dhahran for about 90 years. From there, the company manages its vast network of onshore and offshore oil rigs, pipelines, refineries and export terminals.
The strike on Aramco’s nerve center came during the third day of the WPC Energy Congress, a weeklong oil and gas summit in Riyadh. The conference went forward as planned on Wednesday, with panel discussions on topics like the future of hydrogen and the outlook for natural gas.
But most of the prominent attendees canceled their trips to Riyadh, including the chief executives of BP, Exxon, Shell, Chevron and TotalEnergies.
More oil has been getting out of the region to global customers in the past several weeks, in large part because U.S. military forces have been guiding and protecting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz along the Omani coast, opposite the strait from Iran.
In addition, Saudi Arabia is exporting from both of its coasts again, weeks after it was forced to reduce its Red Sea exports when a drone hit Saudi Arabia’s critical East-West pipeline in September.
In a report on Wednesday, the International Energy Agency said that Saudi Arabia and other crude oil producers in the Persian Gulf exported 13.9 million barrels per day last month, or 75 percent of prewar levels.
The rebound in exports from the region helped push up the global supply of oil. But the agency said it left its projections for global supply for the rest of the year mostly the same because of the uncertainty caused by this month’s “heightened security concerns.”
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