A helicopter operated by Saudi Aramco crashed Sunday in Ras Tanura on the kingdom's Persian Gulf coast, killing all 14 people on board. The Saudi Press Agency said the aircraft went down at 6 a.m. local time, citing the energy ministry, and that everyone on board was a Saudi national. Authorities are investigating and have not disclosed a cause.
Ras Tanura sits at the heart of Saudi Arabia's energy industry, hosting the country's largest refinery and the export terminals that move much of its crude into the Strait of Hormuz. Aramco had only just resumed loading crude at the terminals days earlier after keeping the facilities shut since the Iran war began at the end of February. It was not immediately clear whether the crash affected any energy infrastructure.
The incident lands on a weekend of escalating military exchanges. The United States struck Iranian targets overnight Saturday following an attack on a tanker carrying Qatari oil, and Iran in turn hit US assets in Kuwait and Bahrain on Sunday. Two very large crude carriers loaded at Ras Tanura on Friday, the first to call at the terminal since early March and the clearest sign yet that Saudi exports were beginning to normalize.
Traders are watching closely to see whether the recovery in Gulf shipments can hold. Crude exports from the region have climbed to roughly three quarters of prewar volumes in the week since the interim peace deal, enough to erase the wartime price spike and push benchmark Brent crude back to just under $72 a barrel at Friday's close. A fresh disruption at Ras Tanura would test that fragile recovery and reintroduce a risk premium that the market has only just shaken off.
The area has been a target before. Aramco halted operations at the Ras Tanura refinery in March after a drone strike nearby, and in early April it was hit again in a series of attacks that cut overall crude output and forced a shutdown at the Satorp refinery on the eastern coast that the company runs jointly with TotalEnergies SE.