My last tweet caught unprompted traction—and cue the usual bad faith replies in the mentions—but Saudi Energy Ministry just confirmed the kinetic Houthi hit. Narrative pivot. it's no longer if, it's strictly the outage duration. It appears this was a localized hit on a pump station rather than a sweeping strike spanning hundreds of kilometers. Damage assessment at the pad aside, I’m fading the idea that this flow impairment drags out. As far as I know, there are several contingency plays for such events and I spoke with midstream engineers today. Here are the primary workarounds: 1) Heavily injecting Drag Reducing Agents(DRA). This is one of the fastest emergency levers available. At the fully operational pump station immediately upstream of the damaged site, operators inject large volumes of DRA—specialized polymer chemical additives. This kills boundary layer turbulence inside the pipe, collapsing frictional head loss. Less frictional drag means the upstream head pushes barrels significantly further down the line. It's the standard emergency lever to claw back 10% to 40%+ of lost nameplate flow almost immediately without laying an inch of steel. 2) Hydraulic bypass & pressure rebalancing. Isolate the fried booster and redline the surrounding stations. Upstream station pegs its discharge pressure right against the pipe's MAOP ceiling. Simultaneously the downstream station dials down its suction pressure floor to the absolute limit. Blowing out that delta-P forces the crude across the dead zone via pure brute-force hydraulics. 3) Tactical hardware deployments. Aramco can roll out trailer-mounted mobile pump skids (diesel/gas turbine-driven) straight to the site to patch the lost pressure head. Alternatively close the ESDVs, isolate the manifold and crack the station bypass loop to free-flow barrels around the blast zone. If there are looped parallel segments or pipeline interties nearby, they can divert batches around the pinch point. 4) Lastly, adjusting crude viscosity—such as blending lower-viscosity crudes or condensates—is technically a method, but Saudi Arabia is not a light crude/condensate powerhouse, and maintaining crude quality integrity makes this practically unviable, so let's write that off. Even running every emergency trick, some capacity haircut is baked in. Terminal hubs and refiners at Yanbu will just burn through regional storage buffers to bridge the delta while crews turn wrenches. In conclusion, provided there are no follow-up attacks, these stopgap measures should preserve substantial throughput while repair crews work around the clock. The Saudis are about as prepared for this specific operational headache as anyone can be. The binary risk is follow-up kinetic strikes. If not, this won't morph into a full-blown physical catastrophe. But as we all know, E/W pipeline aside global macro crude setup is already... #oott# #iran#