To Keep Exports Flowing, Saudi Arabia Looks to Import Oil

Attacks on the kingdom’s oil facilities are changing global trade flows in unusual ways


Less than a week after a withering attack on the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, the country is pulling out all the stops to do what it has promised it always would: give customers every drop of oil they’ve ordered.

Aramco, its state-owned oil giant, is reaching out to foreign producers for crude to send to its domestic refineries, so it can divert its own oil to foreign buyers, according to oil traders. It has also been buying other petroleum products, like refined fuels, from neighbors, reversing the region’s usual...