Saudi Aramco Seeks to Double Overseas Strategic Oil Storage Capacity
nashnova research
Aramco CEO Amin Nasser confirmed Thursday that Saudi Arabia is negotiating with multiple governments to access their strategic petroleum reserves for Aramco storage. This means → under sustained Houthi attacks, Riyadh is shifting from reactive defense to pre-positioned supply insurance.
What is Aramco trying to do — and why now?
Saudi Arabia's energy ministry is in talks with several governments, asking them to open strategic petroleum reserve capacity — state-held emergency crude stockpiles — for Aramco's use.
Nasser was explicit: commercial partners offer limited storage. The real volume sits with governments.
This means → Aramco has outgrown commercial tank farms. It wants crude inside other nations' "sovereign vaults" — an arrangement with very few precedents in global oil.
How big is the target — and what does Aramco already have?
The goal is to double overseas storage capacity, though Aramco disclosed neither the current figure nor a timeline.
Aramco already operates commercial storage in South Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, and Sidi Kerir, Egypt's Mediterranean export hub — facilities it has maintained for years.
Nasser said expansion will focus on Asia. In plain terms = Asia is Aramco's biggest buyer cluster. Pre-positioning crude near customers means deliveries keep flowing even if Middle East routes are cut.
What events forced this plan onto the table?
The immediate trigger: sustained Houthi attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure. In September, a drone strike shut down Saudi Arabia's most critical oil pipeline for several days.
On Wednesday, Houthi strikes on Aramco's Shaybah oil field and Dammam airport each killed two people.
Brent crude broke $112 a barrel on Thursday. This reflects a market already pricing in the next, potentially more severe, disruption.
Beyond storage — what else is Aramco building?
Aramco has launched engineering studies to raise crude-transport capacity from the Persian Gulf toward the Red Sea from 7 million barrels per day to 10 million.
It is also developing alternative export corridors. Aramco currently relies on three main routes: the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea / Bab el-Mandeb, and Sidi Kerir on the Mediterranean.
This means → Aramco is running two tracks in parallel — diversifying export routes and pre-positioning overseas inventories. Both aim to cut the shock if any single corridor is severed.
Can this actually happen — and what is the bottleneck?
Nasser's own words: "We are not waiting for the crisis to end." He stressed that supply resilience requires "decades of investment and preparation."
In plain terms = the hard part is not engineering — it is diplomacy. Convincing sovereign governments to allocate their own strategic-reserve capacity to a foreign oil company is a negotiation at the sovereignty level.
Whether overseas strategic storage is materially in place before the next shock will be the real test of this strategy.
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