The Gulf got worse early Friday morning as Kuwait’s massive Mina Al-Ahmadi oil refinery was targeted by a series of drone strikes overnight that took place at the country’s largest oil refinery, and the oil industry was rocked by a dozen or so of a cluster of drone strikes as the U.S. and Iran conflict is in its fifth week.
The strike launched the attack, which has set fires across the heart of the country’s major processing plants and also raised new alarms about the vulnerability of regional energy infrastructure as the U.S.-Iran conflict enters its fifth week. The KPC said the strike took place at midnight when the oil complex of an oil production plant in the early morning of today.
Emergency response teams were immediately sent to the site and fire was quickly put in place. The fires were extinguished in hours and no injuries were reported inside the refinery and no injuries were reported in the plant workforce, the company said. The company said they were able to control the fire in the plant and the damage to the process plants but the full extent of the structural damage to processing businesses was still being assessed.
Another regional chokepoint was a more widespread incident. Kuwait’s military confirmed that air defense systems were operational at night, intercepting a number of “hostile missile and drone threats” launched across the Gulf nation’s territory. Such attacks are part of a response to a recent strike on fuel tanks at Kuwait International Airport by Iran, and regional observers say the strikes are part of a more extensive campaign by Tehran, which has seen neighbors like Bahrain and Kuwait increasingly drawn into the crosshairs of the war.
But the collapse of Mina Al-Ahmadi, the heart of Kuwait’s export capacity, has sent a ripple in global oil markets in the instant. The news of the strike sent a shot across the global energy markets, with Brent crude diving almost 8 percent to about $109 a barrel on Tuesday on the international front as the market responded to the news.
Infrastructure risk: The long-term outages on such refineries could result in shutdown of oil production upstream as Kuwait doesn’t have enough other destinations for its crude. The UN Security Council is to meet later today to discuss a resolution on the security of the Strait of Hormuz, an international waterway already under a “stranglehold” that has further curtailed the flow of energy supplies and is a threat to global energy.
