Powering Possibilities
The Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco), the state-owned oil company of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is headquartered in Dhahran.
Saudi Aramco ranks first among oil companies worldwide in terms of:
– Crude oil production and exports
– Natural gas liquids (NGL) exports, and are among the leading producers of natural gas.
As a national oil company, Saudi Aramco was originally concentrated on the oil and gas production and processing considering that the petrochemical activities were handled by other Saudi companies.
But in the years 2000s, Saudi Arabia decided to reduce its reliance on the oil and gas production and to boost the economical and social development with added values businesses drawn up from the hydrocarbon products.
Since then Saudi Aramco, as the national flagship, took the lead of this process and moved to become a fully integrated, global petroleum and petrochemical enterprise covering all the energy supply chain of the exploration, production, refining, distribution, shipping and marketing.
Saudi Aramco continues to manage the world’s largest conventional crude oil reserves
Saudi Aramco is also the largest exporter of petroleum and plays a major role in natural gas production, refining, and petrochemical.
Its strength comes from its reliable power to provide, its unique ability to foster global energy security and market stability by ramping up oil production to make up for disruptions from other major suppliers.
Saudi Aramco is also going global with working interests in China, Japan, South Korea and in USA.
Saudi Aramco Key Figures
Saudi Aramco publishes figures in volume only:
– Crude oil and condensate reserves 2011: 259.7 billion barrels
– Crude oil production per day 2011: 9.1 million b/d
– Crude production 2011: 3.31 billion barrels
– Natural gas processing 2011: 9.88 billion scf/d
Saudi Aramco Projects and Business Highlights
The development of Petro Rabigh, a joint venture with the Japanese Sumitomo Chemical is the cornerstone of the new strategy of Saudi Aramco to go further downstream in the petrochemical sector.
This trend was leverage by the joint venture with The Dow Chemical Co. from USA for the Sadara project.
With $20 billion, Sadara will be the largest petrochemical facility ever built in one phase.
This process will continue with the expansion of the SATORP refinery into a petrochemical complex in joint venture with Total from France.
Among Saudi Aramco major downstream projects to come:
– Clean Fuel scheme to revamp and upgrade all the Kingdom refineries in beginning with Riyadh
– Greenfield Jizan (or Jazan) Refinery
Offshore Saudi Aramco is to concentrate on the developments of:
– Manifa, the world’s fifth-largest oil field, and Karan, the Kingdom’s first non-associated offshore gas field.
– Wasit Gas offshore field from which the gas processing plant will be one of the largest integrated plants Saudi Aramco has ever built.
– Shallow water exploration drilling operations in the Red Sea.
