Houthi attacks are forcing Saudi barrels back to the Gulf

The pressure on the western coast is not letting up: The Houthis said on Thursday that they hit Aramco's 400k bbl / d Jazan refinery with two drones, the second attack on the facility in under a week. The damage was negligible, limited to a single tank, Bloomberg reports, citing unnamed sources, while Riyadh and Aramco have not commented. Another Aramco facility in Najran was also allegedly targeted on Friday night.

The kingdom's wartime export map is being redrawn in real time: The second supertanker in a week was reportedly spotted moored at Ju’aymah in Sentinel-2 satellite imagery captured Thursday, Bloomberg reports. The 2 mn bbl VLCC is only the second vessel of its size seen at Ras Tanura in nearly a month, the clearest sign yet that Aramco is pushing loadings back into the Gulf as the Houthi campaign makes the Red Sea workaround — the escape valve that has kept Saudi crude moving since Hormuz became a warzone — increasingly untenable.

REMEMBER- Jazan was already offline. Aramco shuttered the refinery on 27 July after a Houthi strike damaged its IGCC complex and tank farm, and repairs were expected to be complete by 15 August, with some reports putting the date at 30 August. Thursday’s strike lands squarely on that restart window.

The commercial damage is already showing up in Aramco’s order book: The company is handling September crude allocations to some Asian term customers on an ad hoc basis, abandoning the monthly OSP-then-allocation cadence that has structured the Asian crude trade for decades, Reuters reports, citing unnamed sources. Four Chinese buyers say they haven’t received September allocations at all, while an Indian refiner got its full volumes but calls them conditional because nobody knows if shipowners will sail. Charterers are refusing both Hormuz and the Red Sea, jeopardizing both of Saudi Arabia's main export ports.

Aramco is discounting and improvising: September Arab Light to Asia was cut to a six-year low to hold demand, and the company is offering cargoes out of Sidi Kerir on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast — which Asian buyers are so far declining, given the longer voyage and higher freight rates. Saudi shipments to Asia fell below 3 mn bbl / d in July, with dark voyages clouding the true figure, following an average of 4.9 mn bbl / d in 2025, Kpler data showed.