Thread: Saudi Troubles
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Old 09-18-2019, 04:04 PM   #165
InglewoodFan
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My 5 cents of technical analysis. Abqaiq facility is what Aramco calls a GOSP, gas-oil separation plant. They take the production from the field and separate the light ends and water from the crude so you have a stabilized product to go down the pipeline to the gulf where it is loaded on tankers or refined at Ras Tanura. Looking at the satellite pictures, it looks like the targets were LPG or butane spheres. These hold the lighter hydrocarbons that are removed from the crude so you don't run into vapour pressure problems in storage and transport. If you don't have a place to put your light ends, you can't run that part of the plant so you can't stabilize the crude. Hence the outage on the production.

My guess is that they are getting back on line so fast because they realized that #### it, we are Saudi Arabia. We'll just flare the hell out the light ends instead of capturing them.

One other reason that the LPG spheres may have been targeted is that they would make one of the more impressive explosions/fires compared to a crude tank or one of the process units.
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