Al-Marsad Newspaper: Eng. Amin Al-Nasser, President of Aramco, revealed that the Crown Prince had aspired to achieve world leadership in the field of petrochemicals since 2015.
He said during an interview with the “Story of Promise” program broadcast on mbc channel: “During my assignment, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman requested a personal interview before the appointment, and I started presenting details about Aramco and the crown prince had several observations, pointing out that the interview was a year 2015 before the announcement of Vision 2030.
Exact questions
And he continued: “The Crown Prince had precise questions that indicated the strategic dimension in the offering, and he asked about the content and where the company is, and at that time we were starting to launch the national transformation program and strengthening the national industry,” adding: “The Crown Prince asked about accelerating the process of gas discoveries so that Gas replaces the burning of liquids in the electricity and water plants, and the possibility of increasing oil production.
And he added, “I mentioned to the Emir that we have investments in petrochemicals, so the Crown Prince stopped me and talked about the gradual transformation of the company from leadership in oil, gas and petrochemicals, and suggested the acquisition of a huge petrochemical company to accelerate global leadership not only in the field of oil and gas, but also in the field of petrochemicals.” .
He pointed out that most of the sources of income in Aramco depend on refineries, but the Crown Prince looked forward to maximizing the value of oil, the necessity of converting a large part of the oil into chemicals, and this has many benefits, including reducing emissions and enhancing the added value by converting crude oil into chemicals, creating new industries and providing Careers.
The reason for going to petrochemicals
In the same context, the Minister of Investment, Engineer Khaled Al-Falih, said that the Crown Prince had a view from the beginning that oil is extracted from the ground and its gains are non-existent after it is burned in a car or plane machine, or it can be transformed into chemical industries of very high value, and accordingly there will be a chain of high value for the Kingdom. And the world.
And he continued: From the beginning, the Crown Prince was asking how much Aramco’s contribution to this chain of value was, and we told him that the percentage was low, compared to the value available in the chemical industry, related products and the pharmaceutical industry. This prompted the Crown Prince to direct us to work to change the image and not to burn these national industries as fuel, but rather Converting to products with high added value.
Selling oil and then buying its products tens of times more
In the same context, Minister of Tourism Ahmed Al-Khatib said that among the things that the Crown Prince was emphasizing is that millions of barrels of oil are sold to the world and they return to us final products ten or twenty times, and that we must convert some of the oil into intermediate products, not final products. At least, this will add a lot of value as the more chain is added the higher the profit will be instead of selling as raw material.
