Saudi Arabia Faces 5-7 Day Countdown on Yanbu Export Stocks as IEA Cuts 2026 Oil Demand Forecast

With the East-West pipeline still shut on Sep 12 following the previous day's drone strikes, industry sources told Reuters that Yanbu's Red Sea export terminal has enough stockpiled crude to sustain shipments for only 5-7 days before Saudi Arabia would need to curtail exports by up to 4% of global supply -- Aramco had restored the line in 3 days after a similar April 2026 strike, but the extent of this damage remained unspecified. Al Jazeera's explainer noted the outage compounds an already-tight market: the IEA's September Oil Market Report, also out this week, cut its 2026 global oil demand forecast to a 2.5 million bpd contraction -- 940,000 bpd steeper than the prior month's estimate -- citing the deepening US-Iran impasse, lost petrochemical feedstock and refined-product supply, and record diesel prices; the same report found global oil production fell 1.6 million bpd month-on-month to 100.1 million bpd in August, with more than 10 million bpd of Gulf capacity still shut in on security risk.