Houston | Fixing the damage done by the attack on the Saudi oil processing plant may be the easy part. The hard part will be calming energy markets, where oil prices have jumped faster than at any time in more than a decade.

The attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq plant, which accounts for 5 per cent of global oil supplies and a nearby facility took 5.7 million barrels a day of production offline for at least a few days. It also highlighted the vulnerability of the sprawling processing plants, pipelines and refineries of the Persian Gulf.