southern producing areas. Northern oil gets refined at multiple
locations, then piped to one of two terminals along the Gulf - Ju’aymah and Ras Tanura - and
from there out to offshore loading platforms and mooring buoys located in water deep enough to
handle oceangoing oil tankers.
All petroleum originating in the south is pumped to Abqaiq, about forty
kilometers inland from the northern end of the Gulf of Bahrain, for processing, and from there
on to Ju’aymah or Ras Tanura, or via the East-West pipeline over twelve hundred kilometers
across the Arabian peninsula and the mountainous spine of western Saudi Arabia to the terminal
at Yanbu on the Red Sea. (Another route out of Abqaiq, the seventeen-hundred-kilometer
Trans-Arabian pipeline that runs to Sidon, on the Mediterranean coast in Lebanon, is mothballed
as I write, as is the Iraq-Saudi pipeline, shut down in 1990 following the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait.)
Whatever the terminal, whichever the coast, the choke points are too
many to count. At Ju’aymah the most likely point of attack would be the metering platform
located eleven kilometers offshore. Four underwater pipelines feed crude oil and bunker fuel to
the platform from onshore storage tanks. The platform, in turn, feeds five single-point mooring
buoys, located still farther offshore, each capable of transferring 2.5 million barrels of oil
and other fuel per day to tankers.
On an average day, about 4.3 million barrels of oil leave Saudi Arabia
via the Ju’aymah terminal. Destroy the surface-metering equipment and control platform, inflict
significant damage to half the mooring buoys and moderate damage to the onshore tank form, and
loading capacity at Ju’aymah would be reduced from those 4.3 million barrels to somewhere
between 1.7 and 2.6 million barrels two months out. Restoring full capacity might take as long
as seven months.
A commando boat attack would do the job. Then and now, the waters
surrounding the arid Arabian peninsula remain, vessel for vessel, one of the most dangerous
navigable sites on earth, a place where even case-hardened destroyers like the U.S.S. Cole can
be sunk by a Zodiac, a couple hundred kilos of plastique, and a crewman resolved to meet his
maker.
Ras Tanura pumps slightly more oil than Ju’aymah - 4.5 million barrels
of sustainable daily export - and it offers a wider variety of targets and more avenues of
attack. Ras Tanura’s Sea Island facility, 1.5 kilometers east of the north pier in the Gulf,
handles nearly all the terminal’s export oil; Platform Four handles half of that and is the
only one of the four to have its own surge tanks and metering equipment, in the latter case
under the platform. (The others use equipment and surge tanks onshore.) As with Ju’aymah’s
metering platform, a commando attack on Platform Four by surface boat or a Kilo-class submarine
- anything is for sale in the global arms bazaar - would be devastating.
Sea Island is fed by a complex of tanks, pipelines, and pumps that is
further connected by pipe to Ju’aymah for added flexibility. This onshore complex is vulnerable
to terrorist attack by ground and air: Ras Tanura sits about a hundred kilometers from the
northern tip of Qatar, a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalists.
Yanbu, on the Red Sea, is more immune to attack, the engineers
concluded, but happily there’s no need to go after it. (I’m thinking like a saboteur here, just
as the CIA trained me to do. One of the benefits of having spent a career as an agency case
officer in some of the world’s most volatile regions was a thorough education in how to destroy
things.) You need only interdict the roughly nine hundred thousand barrels of Arabian light and
superlight crude that are pumped daily to Yanbu to put the terminal out of business, and to do
that, you simply take out Pump Station One, the closest to Abqaiq. Why? Because Pump
locations, then piped to one of two terminals along the Gulf - Ju’aymah and Ras Tanura - and
from there out to offshore loading platforms and mooring buoys located in water deep enough to
handle oceangoing oil tankers.
All petroleum originating in the south is pumped to Abqaiq, about forty
kilometers inland from the northern end of the Gulf of Bahrain, for processing, and from there
on to Ju’aymah or Ras Tanura, or via the East-West pipeline over twelve hundred kilometers
across the Arabian peninsula and the mountainous spine of western Saudi Arabia to the terminal
at Yanbu on the Red Sea. (Another route out of Abqaiq, the seventeen-hundred-kilometer
Trans-Arabian pipeline that runs to Sidon, on the Mediterranean coast in Lebanon, is mothballed
as I write, as is the Iraq-Saudi pipeline, shut down in 1990 following the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait.)
Whatever the terminal, whichever the coast, the choke points are too
many to count. At Ju’aymah the most likely point of attack would be the metering platform
located eleven kilometers offshore. Four underwater pipelines feed crude oil and bunker fuel to
the platform from onshore storage tanks. The platform, in turn, feeds five single-point mooring
buoys, located still farther offshore, each capable of transferring 2.5 million barrels of oil
and other fuel per day to tankers.
On an average day, about 4.3 million barrels of oil leave Saudi Arabia
via the Ju’aymah terminal. Destroy the surface-metering equipment and control platform, inflict
significant damage to half the mooring buoys and moderate damage to the onshore tank form, and
loading capacity at Ju’aymah would be reduced from those 4.3 million barrels to somewhere
between 1.7 and 2.6 million barrels two months out. Restoring full capacity might take as long
as seven months.
A commando boat attack would do the job. Then and now, the waters
surrounding the arid Arabian peninsula remain, vessel for vessel, one of the most dangerous
navigable sites on earth, a place where even case-hardened destroyers like the U.S.S. Cole can
be sunk by a Zodiac, a couple hundred kilos of plastique, and a crewman resolved to meet his
maker.
Ras Tanura pumps slightly more oil than Ju’aymah - 4.5 million barrels
of sustainable daily export - and it offers a wider variety of targets and more avenues of
attack. Ras Tanura’s Sea Island facility, 1.5 kilometers east of the north pier in the Gulf,
handles nearly all the terminal’s export oil; Platform Four handles half of that and is the
only one of the four to have its own surge tanks and metering equipment, in the latter case
under the platform. (The others use equipment and surge tanks onshore.) As with Ju’aymah’s
metering platform, a commando attack on Platform Four by surface boat or a Kilo-class submarine
- anything is for sale in the global arms bazaar - would be devastating.
Sea Island is fed by a complex of tanks, pipelines, and pumps that is
further connected by pipe to Ju’aymah for added flexibility. This onshore complex is vulnerable
to terrorist attack by ground and air: Ras Tanura sits about a hundred kilometers from the
northern tip of Qatar, a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalists.
Yanbu, on the Red Sea, is more immune to attack, the engineers
concluded, but happily there’s no need to go after it. (I’m thinking like a saboteur here, just
as the CIA trained me to do. One of the benefits of having spent a career as an agency case
officer in some of the world’s most volatile regions was a thorough education in how to destroy
things.) You need only interdict the roughly nine hundred thousand barrels of Arabian light and
superlight crude that are pumped daily to Yanbu to put the terminal out of business, and to do
that, you simply take out Pump Station One, the closest to Abqaiq. Why? Because Pump
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