A prolonged shutdown would trigger local shortages, drive up import costs, and undermine the Kingdom's refining self-sufficiency.

Financial and logistical impact

"Based on a net refining margin of 10 dollars/barrel and TotalEnergies' 37.5% stake, a six-month shutdown would represent an EBITDA loss of approximately 315 million USD for the group (less than 1% of its overall earnings)," AlphaValue estimates.

While substitute capacity theoretically exists via the Red Sea refining network, this is severely limited in practice:

- several Red Sea facilities were hit by the same wave of strikes.

- Ras Tanura (550,000 bpd), the natural fallback solution, has been offline since March 2.

- The East-West Pipeline, a critical artery for transporting crude from the Eastern Province to the west, was directly hit, reducing its throughput by approximately 700,000 bpd.

A downstream sector under high tension

Furthermore, according to AlphaValue, Red Sea refineries do not possess SATORP's full conversion capacity and cannot process heavy crude on a massive scale at short notice.

The Saudi downstream sector is now under extreme pressure:

- total production capacity down by approximately 600,000 bpd across several fields.

- four major refining sites disrupted simultaneously.

- LPG/NGL (liquefied petroleum gas/natural gas liquids) exports affected by fires at coastal processing centers.