Saudi Aramco’s logo is pictured at the oil facility in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia, on October 12, 2019.
Maxim Shemetov | Reuters
According to multiple media reports, a huge plume of smoke could be seen over an oil facility in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah on Friday, shortly after Yemen’s Houthi group announced it would issue a statement on a military operation.
A Reuters source said a Saudi Aramco facility was hit in an attack, while The Associated Press cited videos of a raging fire at an oil depot.
The Iran-backed Houthis didn’t immediately claim they were behind a strike, but a tweet from a military spokesman earlier in the day said the group would announce an operation “deep” in Saudi Arabia, according to a Reuters translation.
Brent crude was up $1.20, or 0.7%, to $119.92 a barrel shortly after the news, while US West Texas Intermediate crude was up $1.04, or 0.9%, to $113.34. Both had traded in negative territory at the start of the session.
A spokesman for Saudi Aramco was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
The Associated Press reported that the fire was near the North Jeddah Bulk Plant, which is southeast of the city’s international airport. A Formula 1 race is taking place in Jeddah this weekend.
Attacks 2019
On Sunday morning, Saudi authorities confirmed an attack on Aramco facilities over the past weekend that saw Houthi rebels use missiles and drones to attack at least six sites across the kingdom, including an Aramco fuel depot and a liquefied natural gas plant.
“There were no injuries or deaths and no impact on the company’s shipments to customers,” Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said on a conference call on Sunday.
The Houthis have conducted thousands of cross-border missile and drone strikes on Saudi Arabia in the years since Riyadh launched its airstrike on Yemen, killing tens of thousands of Yemenis.
Aramco suffered a major attack on its assets back in 2019, when strikes at the Abqaiq and Khurais plants disrupted about half of the kingdom’s oil production in one day.
Abqaiq, in the Kingdom’s Eastern Province, is the world’s largest oil refinery and crude oil stabilization facility, with a processing capacity in excess of 7 million barrels per day (bpd). Khurais is the country’s second largest oil field with a production capacity of around 1.5 million bpd.
Those attacks in 2019 were the largest on Saudi oil infrastructure since Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when the Iraqi military fired Scud missiles at the kingdom.
– CNBC’s Natasha Turak contributed to this article.