Saudi-style drone attacks not seen as major risk to U.S., experts say

HOUSTON – The style of attack used against oil plants in Saudi Arabia that knocked out half of the country's production on Saturday is unlikely to be a risk in the United States, energy and security experts say. "The U.S. oil industry has a lot of redundancy," said Amy Myers Jaffe, senior fellow for energy at the Council on Foreign Relations. U.S. refineries go offline often, after accidents or storms, with little impact to the market, Jaffe said. Even production in the country's biggest oil field, the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, is spread across thousands of wells in a 75,000- square-mile (194,250-square-kilometer) region. The kind of gas-oil separation facility hit in the attacks in Saudi Arabia is done in smaller plants located across U.S. oil fields.