How susceptible is Saudi oil to a terrorist attack?
I shouldn't have to tell you how much we, and the rest of the world, depend on Saudi Arabia for our energy needs. But if you need a clue, think $10 a gallon and draw your own conclusions. And while the Saudi government maintains that their oil business is safe from attack, this Economist article shows us how we could all be completely fucked.
Robert Baer, an intelligence expert, offers some suggestions in his disturbing recent book, “Sleeping with the Devil”. He reckons that Ras Tanura, a port on the Gulf, is a vulnerable terrorist target. With an output of perhaps 4.5m bpd [barrels per day], this is the biggest oil-exporting port in the world. Mr Baer thinks a small submarine or a boat laden with explosives (as happened in October 2000 with the attack on the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen) could knock out much of Ras Tanura's output for weeks, or even longer.
An even scarier possibility raised by Mr Baer is the crashing of a hijacked aeroplane into Abqaiq, the world's largest oil-processing complex. If done with the help of insiders, he speculates that the facility's throughput (nearly 7m bpd, on his estimate) would be choked off to as little as 1m bpd for two months—and might remain as low as 3m bpd for seven months.
Mr Woolsey adds that an attack using weapons of mass destruction (especially “dirty bombs”) would be even more devastating than one that used mere aeroplanes. All told, the pessimists reckon that well-co-ordinated attacks could take as much as 6m-7m bpd of Saudi output off the market for weeks, and perhaps longer.
Speaking of weapons of mass destruction and dirty bombs, don't think this isn't a possibility. Talking Points Memo published some rather scary information on the free flow of uranium yesterday.
[Congo] President Joseph Kabila ordered the zone closed three months ago amid growing concerns that unregulated nuclear materials could get into the hands of so-called rogue nations or terrorist groups. Yet 1,000 miles away from the capital, Kinshasa, thousands of diggers are still hacking away at a dark cavity of open earth in this southeastern village, filling thousands of burlap sacks a day with black soil rich in cobalt, copper and radioactive uranium.
The illegal mining provides stark evidence of how little control Africa's third-largest nation has over its own nuclear resources, highlighting the government's weak authority beyond the capital in the aftermath of Congo's devastating 1998-2002 war.
"They're digging as fast as they can dig, and everyone is buying it," John Skinner, a mining engineer in the nearby town of Likasi, said of the illegal freelance mining at Shinkolobwe. "The problem is that nobody knows where it's all going. There is no control."
Billmon illustrated a more dire situation for the Saudi oil industry on Sunday. His predictions could be more far-fetched, [tasnote: Upon further review, Billmon and the Economist rely heavily on the same source, Robert Baer, so Billmon isn't so far-fetched. He does cites the more dire end of Baer's hypothetical situations.], but the fact remains that he, and others, are probably right on the money: al-Qa'ida could take out the Saudi oil industry, which in turn would help wreck the global economy.
If shitheads like me know that al-Qa'ida can cripple Saudi Arabia's oil industry, which would quickly be followed by a downfall in the global economy, then we can assume al-Qa'ida must know this, too. So, one question remains: Why haven't they done such? Nobody knows the answer to this question, but if you're willing to fit a tinfoil hat on your head and speculate, you have to wonder what connections al-Qa'ida has to the Saudi government when we already know that at least one member the the House of Saud had prior knowledge that 9/11 would be happening. And Bush had him, some friends, and members of the bin Laden family, flown out of America a couple days after 9/11. Hmmmm...
