Sioux Falls gasoline prices rose over25 cents per gallon this week after the attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities this weekend.
Prices jumped from $2.42 a gallon for regular unleaded fuel at some Sioux Falls area stations to $2.69 per gallon yesterday.
Saudi Arabia is the world’s biggest crude exporter and one of the top producers. The attack removed half of its output- 5.7 million barrels per day, or the equivalent to 5 percent of global supplies.
Saudi Arabia is also the holder of nearly all the world’s spare oil capacity – which means the ability to increase output quickly to compensate for any problems in supply worldwide. So any further large supply disruption will impact oil supply and prices more than they would have done if Saudi Arabia still had spare capacity.
Before the attack, Saudi Arabia was shipping 7 million barrels of oil around the world daily, much of it to Asian buyers.
(Jon Michaels, KELO.com News, and Reuters contributed to this report.)
