Yanbu Commercial Port

When they targeted Sana'a Airport, we blocked the Red Sea, and we send warning, "No ship is allowed." What the Saudi have done, they have targeted Hodeidah port.

We targeted Yanbu Port.

Then what the Saudi have done, we didn't target Aramco.

What they did, they have targeted a prison in Al Jawf, killing and injuring dozens of civilians, including women and ch- and, and children during the visiting hours.

So two areas of insecurity or two a- or two choke points.

In fact, even if you come out of the Port of Yanbu, please look at the map.

That is the Saudi port on Red Sea.

You come out of the Port of Yanbu, fill a tanker, go to Suez Canal, and then you can go to Europe from there.

But what the Houthis can do is, given the range of their missiles, if they can hit Riyadh, which is more than five hundred kilometers away from where the Houthis, the closest point where the Houthi missile launchers have been noticed, then they can hit Yanbu anytime they feel like.

So this geography makes Saudi Arabia that much more vulnerable.

40% of that is bypassing Hormuz.

That's the Red Sea, Yanbu Port from Saudi Arabia.

Um, but 60% is coming out of the Strait of Hormuz, and we've spoken lots on this podcast about how they're doing that, ship-to-ship transfers.

You know, a lot of it's being offloaded somewhere else.

You can see satellite images of it.

And there's also been, um, uh, yes, two days ago also, the Yanbu Port was struck.

Um, but the... what's happening is that the Saudis are not issuing alerts, and they're try-

Of course not

France is sending troops in defensive systems to protect Saudi Arabia.

Yeah, we've reported that France is sending actual fighter jets to be at Port Yanbu.

I don't know if they've arrived yet or if they're just on call ready to go.

So as we covered, Trump was basically demanding that the Europeans release their strategic reserves, or he was going to, for the first time in the US's history, not export diesel.

But Abqaiq processes the crude, the world's largest oil field, and feeds the export terminals.

So again, they've hit the pump stations on the East-West Pipeline, the refineries, the Abqaiq refinery, the Port Yanbu.

They've hit them from all over.

And yet gas and oil is relatively stable.

And this is a product of under-resourced defense spending by the Europeans for 30 to 40 years.

So you're saying Yan- the Yanbu Port is key because the pipeline goes across Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea, and so it's a lifeline for some of the energy that's blocked in the Strait of Hormuz.

But if they can't go south through this check, this choke point, they're gonna have to go north to the Eur- ...

Maybe that's why the Europeans don't care, because it's gonna go through the Suez Canal.

These disruptions are now starting to affect actual trade flows.

The East-West Pipeline had been moving around four to five million barrel per day of Saudi crude to Yanbu Port, allowing crude to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and reach European refiners through the Red Sea and Mediterranean route.

But with that route now disrupted, more barrels need to move through Hormuz and rely on ship-to-ship transfer around Oman's Sohar Port.

And that has helped to reduce the headline supply losses because some Saudi Gulf exports are still reaching to the market.