Aramco wants to double its overseas oil storage to protect exports from another pipeline outage

Aramco is aiming to double its international crude storage and wants access to government-owned strategic reserves abroad, particularly in Asia, Bloomberg reports, citing CEO Amin Nasser. Two of Saudi Arabia’s three main export corridors depend on a single pipeline, and stockpiles near customers would give Aramco a buffer if that line goes down again.

Aramco already keeps commercial stocks abroad: It holds inventories in Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Egypt’s Sidi Kerir hub. The government-controlled facilities it’s now targeting are much larger.

REMEMBER- Drone strikes knocked out the 7 mn bbl/d East-West pipeline, which carries crude from the Kingdom’s eastern fields to the Red Sea. The outage threatened exports through Yanbu and squeezed the Egyptian corridor running through Ain Sokhna and the Sumed pipeline to Sidi Kerir. Aramco was left leaning harder on Hormuz, the chokepoint the pipeline was built to bypass.

The Red Sea buffers

Yanbu had about a week of crude on hand: When the pipeline went offline, the Red Sea hub had an estimated five to seven days of export-ready crude, Reuters reported at the time. Inventories in Egypt gave Aramco another cushion, but neither could be refilled normally with the pipeline down.

European buyers felt it first: Refiners relying on Yanbu and Sidi Kerir faced delayed or canceled cargoes and had to find supply elsewhere. Poland’s Orlen replaced Saudi barrels with US, Algerian, and Norwegian crude.

Asian buyers still got crude, by way of Hormuz: Their cargoes moved through Ras Tanura instead, with tankers crossing Hormuz before transferring cargoes near Oman. That kept barrels flowing but put the risk back on a contested waterway.

Storage abroad buys time

Aramco renewed its agreement with Japan in November 2025 for access to 8.2 mn barrels of storage, putting Saudi crude close to Asian customers. Japan, in return, gets priority access to that oil in an emergency. The Kingdom has since pushed to expand its Japan-based stockpiles roughly tenfold. The host country gets supply security out of the arrangement, and Aramco gets a buffer whose use could be shaped by the host’s own needs.

Stored barrels still have to be replaced by sea: Once overseas inventories run down, Aramco needs tankers to refill them, and the Gulf’s existing workaround is already expensive. Ship-to-ship transfers can take five to six days for a full VLCC, and average global supertanker earnings hit a record USD 805k a day this month.

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