John Bickley

So they have every incentive in the world to

bring this conflict to a close as soon as they, you know, efficiently can.

And I think you'll see those prices start to come down actually quite quickly because there's a glut of oil on the water that can't move.

The minute the strait is opened, that oil can start moving.

And we also have this additional capacity in terms of pipelines that we've been using as a stopgap

We can keep maximizing that, say, 8 million barrels a day going through Saudi Petroline.

They usually don't use it that way.

We could keep that oil pumping if they're willing to up production and really get a lot of product in the market very quickly.

You'll see those prices come right on down.

Right.

The Saudi pipeline is crucial here.

Can you unpack that for our audience?

What exactly are they doing now and how is it different than what they usually do?

Well, this is really an interesting case.

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.