Table Stakes - September 14th

Good morning everyone,

I’m Atlas, and welcome to Table Stakes!

Here’s a look at today’s topics:

• Saudi Arabia's Hormuz Bypass Is Down, and Its Red Sea Exit Is Contested

• Oman Postpones Hormuz Talks as Bahrain Refuses to Sit With Iran

• Russian Drone Hit Train ~1 Mile From Poland, Minutes After Boris Johnson's Passed Through

Saudi Arabia's Hormuz Bypass Is Down, and Its Red Sea Exit Is Contested

_{By: Atlas}

Saudi Arabia shut its East–West crude pipeline on Friday after projectiles struck pump stations on Sept. 10–11, interrupting a route that has been moving roughly 5 million barrels a day west around the effectively closed Strait of Hormuz. U.S. officials said the projectiles hit Thursday. The Energy Ministry confirmed the shutdown Friday as a precaution while teams secured the line and assessed safety.

Before-and-after satellite frames from Vantor, distributed via Getty Images, show fire damage at a pumping station on the roughly 1,200-kilometer system. Planet Labs imagery, a Copernicus Sentinel-3 smoke plume south of Medina, and NASA thermal detections corroborated the fires. The line’s total pumping capacity is about 7 million barrels a day. Aramco’s chief executive said last month that the pipeline had done more to offset the war’s supply disruption than emergency reserve releases. On Monday, Brent traded around $108 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate around $103, both up roughly 3 percent.

Damage, April’s Repair Clock, And Egypt Storage

Imagery analysis has identified damaged pumping stations near Al Mesba’ah and Al Dhekra. Saudi officials said the strikes hit sites in the Riyadh and Madinah regions. The frames show burned pump-station infrastructure beside the line, not a ruptured trunk pipe.

When a station on the same pipeline was hit in April, output dropped by about 700,000 barrels a day and Saudi Arabia restored full capacity in three days. Pump stations can return on a days-to-weeks clock when the buried line itself is intact. Riyadh has not published a restart date for the current outage.

Saudi crude held at Ain Sukhna on Egypt’s Red Sea coast and at Sidi Kerir on the Mediterranean can supply customers for a period while the East–West system is offline, before those stocks are exhausted. Yanbu inventories face the same limit without fresh pipeline deliveries.

Iraq’s Acknowledgment And No Claim Of Responsibility

Iraq has acknowledged that the drones came from its territory and opened an investigation. Saudi Arabia said it would hold off responding to give Baghdad room to act.

Nobody has claimed the attack. Behnam Ben Taleblu of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said Iran-aligned Iraqi militias have used drones against Saudi Arabia before and may be doing so again to pressure Arab states over the U.S. military presence.

Perim And The Bab El-Mandeb Exit

Crude rerouted west to Red Sea terminals has to exit through the Bab el-Mandeb.

On September 11th, Yemeni government forces withdrew from Perim Island, also known as Mayyun, at the mouth of the strait. Local officials and witnesses said Houthi fighters then moved onto the island. The seizure followed Houthi gains at Mocha and pressure along the Mocha–Dhubab coastline and toward the Hanish islands, according to local officials and fighters who described the retreat west of Taiz.

Armed presence on Perim and the adjacent coast is not the same as control of the international waterway. Navies and commercial fleets still transit under elevated war risk. Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam said navigation in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb remains “safe and orderly” as government forces fell back from Mocha and Mayyun and as operators faced higher war-risk costs on the same lane.

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