John Bickley

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.

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.