In a show of defiance to the Saleh government, Yemeni tribesmen in the Maarib region of Yemen blew up a section of Yemen’s dormant main oil export pipeline last week, say Yemei government officials.
According to a Reuters report yesterday, the tribesmen have successfully further sabotaged the Maarib pipeline. The Saleh government recently announced it may take military action to restart exports badly needed to prevent the embattled government from going bankrupt.
The pipeline had already been out of action since March due to a previous act of sabotage, and is set to render Yemen’s main export route inoperable for several months, even if opposition to President Saleh is somehow appeased.
The country’s largets Aden refinery has mostly sat dry for several months for want of oil, giving the government the double headache of having to continue oil export commitments elsewhere while importing Saudi oil, a move seen as politically noxious and which due to reduced oil exports it can ill afford. Aden has briefly been restarted two weeks ago when 2 million barrels of donated Saudi crude arrived, though the 150,000 barrels per day plant has seen no further crude since then.
Government and opposition officials blamed each other for the Thursday attack on a secondary pipeline, which had gone empty since the March attack on Maarib’s main supply route.
Political leaders both for and against Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s embattled government have accused each other of backing armed tribesmen to act as saboteurs, according to Reuters.
Saleh, now in hospital in Riyadh after an apparent assassination attempt, has faced months of unrest after a wave of mass pro-democracy protests spread across the impoverished state.
The halt in output of 110,000 bpd of light, sweet Yemeni crude after the March attack has further tightened global supplies of easily refined oil after light Libyan crude exports were stopped in February.
