(Bloomberg) -- Oil surged as Yemen’s Houthi rebels said they attacked an oil facility in Saudi Arabia.
Futures surged as much as 1.7% in New York on reports of the attack. The rebels said that they launched attacks with missiles and drones on Saudi Aramco’s Jazan facility in the kingdom’s south. Airports in the region and the Khamis Mushait base were also targeted, Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree said on television.
Jazan is the site of a 400,000 barrel-a-day Aramco (SE:2222) refinery but the city, near the border with Yemen, isn’t home to crude oil production facilities or major export terminals. The Jazan refinery and petrochemical complex isn’t yet operating at its full capacity, but is expected to do so in the second half of 2020, Aramco said at the time of its initial public offering last year.
The price jump added to a broader recovery in commodities prices as traders assessed the impact of China’s coronavirus outbreak on the demand for raw materials. While the number of confirmed infections in China has overtaken the official number recorded during the 2003 SARS epidemic, it’s still unclear how severely world oil consumption will be affected.
West Texas Intermediate for March delivery rose 48 cents to $53.96 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange as of 8:49 a.m. New York time. The contract settled up 0.6% on Tuesday. Brent for March settlement advanced 1.2% to $60.23 a barrel on the London-based ICE (NYSE:ICE) Futures Europe exchange.
(An earlier version of this story corrected analysts’ estimates for U.S. stockpiles.)
