HOUSTON, Sept. 23 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said Monday that crude oil production outage in Saudi Arabia due to attacks on its key oil facilities has affected the global crude oil and gasoline prices.
On Sept. 14, drone attacks damaged the Saudi Aramco Abqaiq oil processing facility and the Khurais oil field in eastern Saudi Arabia.
The Abqaiq oil processing facility is the world's largest crude oil processing and stabilization plant, with a capacity of 7 million barrels per day, or about 7 percent of global crude oil production capacity.
On Monday, Sept. 16, the first full day of trading after the attack, Brent and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices experienced the largest single-day price increase in the past decade.
Although U.S. imports of crude oil from Saudi Arabia have declined during the past three years, the United States still imports about 7 million barrels per day of crude oil.
As a result, a tighter global crude oil market and increased global crude oil prices will ultimately increase the price of crude oil and transportation fuels in the country, said the EIA.
The EIA data showed that U.S. imports of crude oil from Saudi Arabia hit a four-week average record low of 380,000 barrels per day in the week ending Sept. 6.
Oil prices jumped for the week ending Sept. 20 with the price of WTI for October delivery up 5.91 percent and Brent crude oil for November delivery up 6.74 percent.
Crude oil prices are the biggest factor for the retail price of gasoline, the most widely consumed transportation fuel in the United States.
Each dollar per barrel of sustained price change in crude oil translates to an average change of about 2.4 cents per gallon in petroleum product prices.
