Saudi Aramco’s Ras Tanura target of attempted drone attack, defence ministry says

An employee uses binoculars to look out towards the Arabian Sea in the Port Control Center at Saudi Aramco's Ras Tanura oil refinery and terminal in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia.

RIYADH — Saudi Aramco’s Ras Tanura, which houses its largest domestic refinery and a key crude export terminal, was targeted by an attempted drone attack on Wednesday, a Saudi defense ministry spokesperson said on X, two days after a drone attack on the complex shut the refinery.

The attack resulted in no damage, the spokesman said. The Saudi state news agency also cited an energy ministry source as saying that there was no disruption to supplies.

Three separate sources told Reuters that Ras Tanura had been struck, but did not provide details on any damage.

Saudi Arabia and other regional Gulf oil producers, such as the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Iraq, have been ​unable to move oil through the Strait of Hormuz since the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran on Friday.

Hundreds of ships have anchored on either ​side of the Strait as a precaution, and Iran has said it would fire on any vessel that attempted to ⁠transit the shipping choke point.

Ras Tanura sits on Saudi Arabia’s eastern coast on the Gulf. Aramco is attempting to reroute some of its crude exports to the Red Sea to avoid the Strait, sources have said.

Aramco did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Saudi Arabia’s heavily fortified energy facilities have been targeted previously, most notably in September 2019 when unprecedented drone and missile attacks on the Abqaiq and Khurais plants temporarily knocked out more than half of the kingdom’s crude production and roiled global markets.

Ras Tanura was attacked by Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis in 2021, in what Riyadh called a failed assault on global energy security.

(Reporting by Timour Azhari in Riyadh, Maha El Dahan in Dubai and Yousef Saba; Editing by Jan Harvey and Tomasz Janowski)