John Bickley

So the Saudis built this pipeline, Petroline, from Abaqaq, which folks might remember from the 2019 attack.

It's their big oil processing plant on the Persian Gulf, to Yanbu, which is a port north of Jeddah on the Red Sea.

And they built it in the 80s because of the Iran-Iraq war.

There was something called the tanker wars, not dissimilar to what we're seeing today.

where Iran and Iraq were attacking each other's tankers in the Gulf.

The situation was really unstable.

And the Saudis smartly said, why on earth don't we have another way to get our product out?

And they built this pipeline.

And so we'd seen it used for a couple hundred thousand barrels a day, not a massive amount.

But the beginning of this conflict, they ramped it up to five million barrels a day.

And then the CEO of Aramco, I mean, Nasser, came out a couple of days ago and said, we think we can go as high as eight.

So that's not the $20 million a day we're used to getting out of the Gulf, but it's a big chunk of it.

And it's the reason why all of the experts that were producing $200 a barrel oil, that has not come to fruition.

Now, Japan is one of the countries saying it will assist in opening the Strait of Hormuz.

Is that surprising?

And what kind of a difference can that make?

This is a really interesting pattern I've traced with President Trump, where he says to the Europeans, I need you to do something.

They say, absolutely not.

It's impossible.

We never will.