Saudi Arabia, which pumps 10 percent of the world's oil, has plenty of potential targets for terrorists wishing to attack the country and its rulers: more than 50 oil fields, 20,000km of pipelines and dozens of related plants across a country larger than Mexico.
As the US and allies bomb Afghanistan in connection with the Sept. 11 terror attacks, some experts say that if Saudi exile Osama bin Laden strikes, he may act in his former homeland. He said on al-Jazeera TV that "the wind of change is blowing to remove evil from the peninsula" that includes Saudi Arabia.
"The oil installations are highly vulnerable to terrorist attacks," said Roger Tomkys, who chairs the Center for Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies at Cambridge University and served as a British diplomat in the region. "They must be very jumpy."
While no threats have been made against the country's oil infrastructure, security is "substantial" at all sites, said Stephen Sawyer, a spokesman for the state oil company, Saudi Aramco, who declined to be more specific.
Crude oil prices have fallen by about 20 percent since the strikes on New York and Washington, a reflection of oil traders' greater concern about slowing energy demand than the risk to Saudi oil.
That's not to say concern isn't rising. Bin Laden's group was planning attacks in Saudi Arabia that may have coincided with the US strikes that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unidentified US officials.
Saturday, a bomb exploded at a shopping center in the eastern Saudi Arabian town of Al-Khobar, killing two people, including one American, and injuring four others, a Bush administration official said. The area is home to most expatriate employees of Aramco. The US official said it appeared to be an isolated incident.
Bin Laden's primary complaint has been the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia. Saudi oil fields were found, financed and developed largely by US companies -- Chevron Corp, Texaco Inc, Exxon Corp and Mobil Corp -- from 1933 to 1973, when the government began to nationalize the industry.
The risk for the world economy is that the most exposed targets in the kingdom are the oil rigs, pipelines and other equipment that sit atop a quarter of the world's known supplies.
The Abqaiq processing hub just inland from the Persian Gulf handles 70 percent of the nation's oil supply.
Saudi Aramco pumps more than twice as much crude as Exxon Mobil Corp, the world's largest publicly traded oil company. No additional security steps have been taken since Sept. 11, the Aramco spokesman said.
"The company already had substantial security at all installations," Sawyer said, explaining why further measures haven't been taken.
CB Stevens, a former US military special forces officer who runs safety installations for oil companies in the Middle East, said pipelines are almost impossible to defend. Individual wells aren't worth bombing because a typical field has dozens if not hundreds of them, he said. The sites needing defense would be transport hubs and ports, he said.
Also exposed in Saudi Arabia is the expatriate community.
About 40,000 Americans live and work in Saudi Arabia, according to the US embassy. About 8,000 of Aramco's 54,000 staff are non-Saudi. Of those, about 3,000 are US, British or Canadian, and the rest are laborers from developing countries.
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