This article claims that only a third of the damage might be repaired quickly:
Someone ["Homeboy"] left this interesting comment two days ago in the FT - I think it's worth pasting almost in its entirety, as it describes the stricken plant's workings and importance in some detail.
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As for this strike, it all depends on the extent of damage on the stabilisation plant - it is so unbelievably critical in taking GOSP (gas-oil separation plants) oil to become marketable crude oil later to be refined. These sixty odd plants take raw field crude mixture of oil, gas, sand and water to be separated for further processing. In the GOSP, the oil is depressurised in multiple spheroids to free the dissolved gases.
After depressurisation, water and dissolved gases are extracted from the oil. The depressurised oil is sent to the stabilisation unit, where it is pumped into 18 stabiliser columns. Final gas separation and removal of hydrogen sulphide take place in the stabilisation unit.
The resultant dry, hydrogen sulphide-free, stabilised oil is sent to the refining plants in Ras Tanura and Jubail on the east coast, Yanbu on the west coast and Bapco in Bahrain.
The off gases from the oil processing unit are sent to the NGL facility for processing.
Feed gas received from the oil processing unit is compressed in NGL's compression trains and passed through the stripper columns and de-ethaniser column. The resultant effluent from the columns consists of overhead light gases and NGL product (oil).
The light gases are transported to other gas plants for processing and the NGL product is sent to the Ras Tanura refinery for fractionation (a separation process). There are 5 stabilisation plants throughout the Kingdom. Abqaiq the one hit being by far and away the largest with 13m bpd capacity but Aramco claim only 6.1m bpd capacity - perhaps holding back idle spare capacity for emergencies. The other 4 plants process about 2.6m bpd of GOSP crude.
This was a very smart strategic strike and no Houthi rebel concocted this level of sophistication, Iranian hands are all over this. The plant is one massive compressed gas sphere, if the whole plant is down it will take a year to rebuild. The impact to the giant Ghawar oil field cannot be underestimated (3.8mill bpd). If Saudi is unable to stabilise 7mill bpd oil then this is much larger than the Gulf War, $20-30/bbl crude moves back to the $85 recent highs are not unwarranted. IEA and SPR crude and product releases will be the next steps.
If however the damage is minor and Saudi use the spare stabilisation capacity then the price impact is minor. However, the market had mispriced oil political tail risk for some time now and the stakes have been raised. Saudi/Iranian conflict is one step closer no matter what happens to the bicycle stabilisers.
Source:
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By the way - what's to stop more strikes on similar [or the same] targets by similar methods? My take is that after some in-depth recon, assets were put in place nearby with clear knowledge of what to strike to maximise the damage. Widely available commercial drones with relatively small quantities of "plastic" explosive would do the trick. I've been waiting for this to happen, actually.
