Saudi Arabia's state-owned shipping company is taking Valero to court, alleging the Houston oil company sold one of its ro-ros bad fuel.
The National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia, better known as Bahri, filed the $1.13m suit in Houston federal court Monday.
It alleges Valero filled the 26,000-dwt Bahri Yanbu (built 2014) with 750 tonnes of "unsuitable, substandard, defective, contaminated, unfit, non-conforming, off-speculation bunker" last March in Houston.
After switching to the fuel a little over a month later, the ship was allegedly forced to stop its engines, leaving it drifting at sea for two and a half days.
The complaint said the crew was able to get the engines started, and piloted it to Alexandria, Egypt where an investigation found damage to the ship's injection system, pistons and valves.
According to the suit the ship had to refuel at Jeddah and dump the remaining bad bunker at Fujairah.
Valero did not immediately return requests for comment.
A pretrial hearing has been scheduled for July.
