Sleeping With The Devil (2 page)

    Restoring the pressure-reducing spheroids would require not much more
than the installation of a series of temporary valves, to be replaced eventually by permanent
ones. The storage tanks wouldn’t be much of a problem, either. A few repairs here and there,
and you would have full-production capacity back in no time at all.

    The stabilizing towers are another story. Sulfur and oil go hand in
hand. The same eons-long processes that make one make the other. But until the sulfur is
removed, petroleum is useless. To get from one state to the other - from sour to sweet -
petroleum goes through a process known as hydrodesulfurization.

    At Abqaiq, hydrodesulfurization takes place in ten tall, cylindrical
towers. Inside the towers, hydrogen is introduced into the oil in sufficient quantities to
convert sulfur into hydrogen sulfide gas, which then rises to the top of the structure, where
it is harvested and rendered into harmless, environmentally safe, and usable sulfur.

    But hydrogen sulfide is no everyday gas. Familiar to generations of
high school chemistry students as the rotten-egg (or “fart”) gas, it is highly corrosive and
potentially fatal to humans. As long as the gas is confined in the stabilizing towers,
everything is fine. Blow the top off a tower, or a wide hole through it, or bring it crashing
down by detonating a truck loaded with three thousand pounds of explosives at its base, and all
hell breaks loose.

    In the atmosphere, hydrogen sulfide reacts with moisture to create the
acid sulfur dioxide. Once formed, the acid would rapidly settle on surrounding pipes, valve
fittings, flanges, connectors, pump stations, and control boxes, and begin eating its way
through everything like some bionic omnivorous termite. But the initial release of hydrogen
sulfide would have far more serious effects because of what it does to humans.

    The federal Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a
sister agency of the Centers for Disease Control, classifies hydrogen sulfide as a
broad-spectrum poison - that is, it attacks multiple systems in the body. “Breathing very high
levels of hydrogen sulfide can cause death within just a few breaths,” ATSDR reports. “There
could be loss of consciousness after one or more breaths. Exposure to lower concentrations can
result in eye irritation, a sore throat and cough, shortness of breath, and fluid in the lungs.
These symptoms usually go away in a few weeks. Long-term, low-level exposure may result in
fatigue, loss of appetite, headaches, irritability, poor memory, and dizziness.”

    The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) wing of the
U.S. Department of Labor has established an acceptable ceiling concentration of twenty parts
per million (ppm) of hydrogen sulfide in the workplace, with a maximum level of fifty ppm
allowed for ten minutes “if no other measurable exposure occurs.” The more conservative - and
less politically sensitive - National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommends a
maximum exposure level of ten ppm.

    A moderately successful attack on the Abqaiq facility’s stabilizing
towers would let loose seventeen hundred ppm of hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere. That
strength would dissipate, but not quickly enough to prevent the death of workers in the
immediate vicinity and serious injury to others in the general area - or to stop sulfur dioxide
from eating into the metallic heart of the Saudi oil infrastructure. The toxicity also would
deter the onset of repairs for months.

    At the least, a moderate-to-severe attack on Abqaiq would slow average
production there from 6.8 million barrels a day to roughly a million barrels for the first two
months postattack, a loss equivalent to approximately one-third of America’s current daily
consumption of crude oil. Even as long as seven months after an attack, Abqaiq output would
still be about 40 percent of preattack output, as much as 4 million barrels below normal -
roughly equal to what all of the OPEC partners collectively took out of production during the
devastating 1973 embargo.

    THE ABQAIQ SCENARIO was only one of many considered by the Reagan-era
disaster planners, in part because Saudi Arabia’s oil system is so target-rich. Any oil
extraction, production, and delivery system relies on a large, mostly exposed exoskeleton. Add
to that the topography of eastern Saudi Arabia, where the vast oil fields are located - an
ocean of sand broken by shifting dunes, all of it sloping gently into the Persian Gulf - and
you have a security consultant’s worst nightmare. Taking down Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure
is like spearing fish in a barrel. It’s not a question of opportunity; it’s a question of how
good your bang men are and what you give them to work with.

    Saudi Arabia has more than eighty active oil and gas fields, and more
than a thousand working wells, but half of its proven reserves - 12.5 percent of all the known
oil in the world - is contained in eight fields, including Ghawar, the world’s largest onshore
oil field; and Safaniya, the largest offshore field in existence. One element that made Pearl
Harbor such an attractive target in 1941 was so much American firepower, air and sea, boxed in
such a small space. Even if a Japanese bomb missed its target, it was likely to find something
worth blowing up. Tactically, the Saudi fields offer much the same sort of target environment.
One scenario concluded that if terrorists were to simultaneously hit only five of the many
sensitive points in Saudi Arabia’s downstream oil system, they could put the Saudis out of the
oil-producing business for about two years.

    Once it’s out of the ground or the seabed, Saudi oil moves through
roughly seventeen thousand kilometers of pipe: from well to refinery, from refinery to onshore
and offshore ports, within the kingdom and without. Much of that pipe is above ground. The
buried part lies an average of three quarters of a meter below the surface, often in land
occupied by nomadic tribes. A camel for transport, a spade, and a cordless drill are enough to
sabotage a section of pipe. But if you want to step up the damage, there’s no want of
explosives in the explosive Middle East. A sack of fertilizer, a bucket of fuel oil, and a
stick of dynamite would do the trick.

    The kingdom maintains a huge inventory of pipe, which makes a single
saboteur no more threatening than a gnat, but multiple saboteurs operating in concert at
broadly spaced intervals throughout the oil web would create a plague of gnats as unpleasant
and diverting as - and far more destructive than - the clouds of gnats that settle on Sunday
picnics. Pipes, though, are the least of the problems.

    A typical Saudi oil well produces about five thousand barrels a day of
runny gunk: an unusable mixture of oil, dissolved gases, sulfur impurities, and salt water
pumped into the well to create sufficient pressure to force the gunk out. From the wells, oil
is pumped to one of five gas and oil separation plants maintained by Saudi Aramco, Saudi
Arabia’s state oil company. In vast, bulbous spheroids, a pressure step-down process releases
most of the dissolved gases, while a second process takes out the salt water. The remaining
sour crude is piped on to one of five stabilization facilities, where the pressure is further
stepped down and oil is held in storage tanks pending desulfurization.

    From a system engineer’s point of view, all this movement, from the
well through the refining process, is a ballet of connectivity. The stabilizing towers where
the sulfur is neutralized, the spheroids where pressure is reduced and other impurities are
siphoned off, the storage tanks where the oil is held between processing and shipping are, in
effect, cathedrals of the industrial process. Terrorists and saboteurs tend to view the world
differently. To them, the architectural features of downstream production offer one very
attractive thing: virtually unimpeded line-of-sight targeting, just like the World Trade Center
towers on a clear day.

    There’s also the distribution and delivery side. The Saudi oil system
is divided into northern and southern producing areas. Northern oil gets refined at multiple
locations, then piped to one of two terminals along the Gulf - Ju’aymah and Ras Tanura - and
from there out to offshore loading platforms and mooring buoys located in water deep enough to
handle oceangoing oil tankers.

    All petroleum originating in the south is pumped to Abqaiq, about forty
kilometers inland from the northern end of the Gulf of Bahrain, for processing, and from there
on to Ju’aymah or Ras Tanura, or via the East-West pipeline over twelve hundred kilometers
across the Arabian peninsula and the mountainous spine of western Saudi Arabia to the terminal
at Yanbu on the Red Sea. (Another route out of Abqaiq, the seventeen-hundred-kilometer
Trans-Arabian pipeline that runs to Sidon, on the Mediterranean coast in Lebanon, is mothballed
as I write, as is the Iraq-Saudi pipeline, shut down in 1990 following the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait.)

    Whatever the terminal, whichever the coast, the choke points are too
many to count. At Ju’aymah the most likely point of attack would be the metering platform
located eleven kilometers offshore. Four underwater pipelines feed crude oil and bunker fuel to
the platform from onshore storage tanks. The platform, in turn, feeds five single-point mooring
buoys, located still farther offshore, each capable of transferring 2.5 million barrels of oil
and other fuel per day to tankers.

    On an average day, about 4.3 million barrels of oil leave Saudi Arabia
via the Ju’aymah terminal. Destroy the surface-metering equipment and control platform, inflict
significant damage to half the mooring buoys and moderate damage to the onshore tank form, and
loading capacity at Ju’aymah would be reduced from those 4.3 million barrels to somewhere
between 1.7 and 2.6 million barrels two months out. Restoring full capacity might take as long
as seven months.

    A commando boat attack would do the job. Then and now, the waters
surrounding the arid Arabian peninsula remain, vessel for vessel, one of the most dangerous
navigable sites on earth, a place where even case-hardened destroyers like the U.S.S. Cole can
be sunk by a Zodiac, a couple hundred kilos of plastique, and a crewman resolved to meet his
maker.

    Ras Tanura pumps slightly more oil than Ju’aymah - 4.5 million barrels
of sustainable daily export - and it offers a wider variety of targets and more avenues of
attack. Ras Tanura’s Sea Island facility, 1.5 kilometers east of the north pier in the Gulf,
handles nearly all the terminal’s export oil; Platform Four handles half of that and is the
only one of the four to have its own surge tanks and metering equipment, in the latter case
under the platform. (The others use equipment and surge tanks onshore.) As with Ju’aymah’s
metering platform, a commando attack on Platform Four by surface boat or a Kilo-class submarine
- anything is for sale in the global arms bazaar - would be devastating.

    Sea Island is fed by a complex of tanks, pipelines, and pumps that is
further connected by pipe to Ju’aymah for added flexibility. This onshore complex is vulnerable
to terrorist attack by ground and air: Ras Tanura sits about a hundred kilometers from the
northern tip of Qatar, a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalists.

    Yanbu, on the Red Sea, is more immune to attack, the engineers
concluded, but happily there’s no need to go after it. (I’m thinking like a saboteur here, just
as the CIA trained me to do. One of the benefits of having spent a career as an agency case
officer in some of the world’s most volatile regions was a thorough education in how to destroy
things.) You need only interdict the roughly nine hundred thousand barrels of Arabian light and
superlight crude that are pumped daily to Yanbu to put the terminal out of business, and to do
that, you simply take out Pump Station One, the closest to Abqaiq. Why? Because Pump Station
One sends the oil uphill, into the al-Aramah mountain range, so it can begin its long journey
across the peninsula. Without a working pump behind it, the oil flows in the wrong direction.

    Even the short pipe run from Abqaiq to the Gulf terminals is not
without opportunity. At Qatif Junction, a few kilometers inland from the coast, a manifold
complex directs the flow of oil to Ras Tanura or Ju’aymah, or to the dormant Trans-Arabian
pipeline. Inflict heavy damage on the complex and you’ll stop the oil in its tracks for months.
Unlike the off-the-shelf pipes that connect the terminals and processing facilities, the
manifolds and pipe junctions at Qatif Junction would require custom fabrication to replace.

    The assessments by the disaster planners were downplayed, for fear of
rocking global oil markets, but you can bet they are not the only people to have calculated how
much damage could be done to the Saudi petroleum chain - or the global money chain - by an
expedient as relatively simple as blowing one of Abqaiq’s stabilizing towers, or Ras Tanura’s
Platform Four, or the East-West pipeline’s Pump Station One to smithereens. (Or, of course, all
three.) A single jumbo jet with a suicide bomber at the controls, hijacked during takeoff from
Dubai and crashed into the heart of Ras Tanura, would be enough to bring the world’s
oil-addicted economies to their knees, America’s along with them. Indeed, such an attack would
be more economically damaging than a dirty nuclear bomb set off in midtown Manhattan or across
from the White House in Lafayette Square.