Wrecking oil infrastructure is easy; rebuilding it is hard.
A few years ago in Dhahran, the Saudi state oil company, Aramco, gave me a tour of its headquarters, a facility so sparkling and orderly that one could forget that its whole purpose was to extract from the ground one of the filthiest substances on Earth. The most impressive stop on the tour was the Aramco emergency command center, which I imagine is paying its workers a lot of overtime right now. It looked like the control room for a mission to Alpha Centauri. Men and women sat at their stations. The walls were aglow with constellations of green lights—each one, my host said, representing a functioning object in the Aramco galaxy of pipelines, valves, ships, buses, heat exchangers, and drill bits. If a light flashed red, it meant one of these objects was broken, and the people at those stations would vault into action to support the crew restoring it.
