The biggest exporter has let prices plummet—delaying the day when climate concerns, efficiency, and fuel switching break the world’s dependence on crude.
(Bloomberg)
Last fall, as oil prices crashed, Ali al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s petroleum minister and the world’s de facto energy czar, went mum. He still popped up, as is his habit, at industry conferences on three continents. Yet from mid-September to the middle of November, while benchmark crude prices plunged 21 percent to a four-year low, Naimi didn’t utter a word in public.
For 20 years, Bloomberg Markets reports in its May 2015 issue, the world’s $2 trillion oil market has parsed Naimi’s every syllable for signs of where supply and prices are heading. Twice during previous routs—amid the Asian financial crisis in 1998 and again when the global economy melted down 10 years later—Naimi reversed oil’s free fall by orchestrating production cutbacks among members of OPEC. This time, he went to ground.
At the cartel’s semiannual meeting on Nov. 27 in Vienna, Naimi shot down proposed output reductions supported by a majority of the 12 members in favor of a more daring strategy: keep pumping and wait for lower prices to force high-cost suppliers out of the market. Oil prices fell a further 10 percent by the end of the next day and kept going. Having averaged $110 a barrel from 2011 through the middle of 2014, Brent crude, the global benchmark, dipped below $50 in January.
Naimi, 79, dominated the debate at the November meeting, according to officials briefed on the closed-door proceedings. He told his OPEC counterparts they should maintain output to protect market share from rising supplies of U.S. shale oil, which costs more to get out of the ground and thus becomes less viable as prices fall. In December, he said much the same thing in a press interview, arguing that it was “crooked logic” for low-cost producers such as Saudi Arabia to pump less to balance the market.
Supply was only half the calculus, though. While the new Saudi stance was being trumpeted as a war on shale, Naimi’s not-so-invisible hand pushing prices lower also addressed an even deeper Saudi fear: flagging long-term demand.
Naimi and other Saudi leaders have worried for years that climate change and high crude prices will boost energy efficiency, encourage renewables, and accelerate a switch to alternative fuels such as natural gas, especially in the emerging markets that they count on for growth. They see how demand for the commodity that’s created the kingdom’s enormous wealth—and is still abundant beneath the desert sands—may be nearing its peak. This isn’t something the petroleum minister discusses in depth in public, given global concern about carbon emissions and efforts to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. But Naimi acknowledges the trend. “Demand will peak way ahead of supply,” he told reporters in Qatar three years ago. If growth in oil consumption flattens out too soon, the transition could be wrenching for Saudi Arabia, which gets almost half its gross domestic product from oil exports.
Last week, in a speech in Riyadh, Naimi said Saudi Arabia would stand “firmly and resolutely” with others who oppose any attempt to marginalize oil consumption. “There are those who are trying to reach international agreements to limit the use of fossil fuel, and that will damage the interests of oil producers in the long-term,” he said.
U.S. State Department cables released by WikiLeaks show that the Saudis’ interest in prolonging the world’s dependence on oil dates back at least a decade. In conversations with colleagues and U.S. diplomats, Naimi responded to the American fixation on “security of supply” with the Saudi need for “security of demand,” according to a 2006 embassy dispatch. “Saudi officials are very concerned that a climate change treaty would significantly reduce their income,” James Smith, the U.S. ambassador to Riyadh, wrote in a 2010 memo to U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “Effectively, peak oil arguments have been replaced by peak demand.”
Before oil prices tanked last year, Saudi officials were bracing for global demand to level off as soon as 2025, says Mohammed al-Sabban, a senior economic adviser to the Saudi petroleum minister from 1988 to 2013. By letting prices fall, they may have bought themselves some time. At $60 to $70 a barrel, peak demand gets pushed back at least five more years, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch commodities researchers. Such a delay would be bad news for renewable energy companies and for anyone hoping to bend the demand curve lower—slowing or stopping the relentless rise of global oil consumption that has transformed the planet since the first commercial deposit was developed in Pennsylvania in the early 1860s.
Crude prices above $100 a barrel had been bringing a demand peak closer. “The past four years were a disaster for oil producers in terms of energy market share,” says Sabban, who was also Saudi Arabia’s chief international climate negotiator. “Emerging economies are getting more efficient and diversifying their energy sources. That has definitely impacted oil consumption.”
Saudi officials were in a state of “near panic” last summer, when they recognized how quickly demand growth in China was leveling off, in part because of persistently high crude prices, says Ed Morse, Citigroup’s head of commodities research. “Naimi saw the era of frantic fixed-asset investments in China was over,” says Morse, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international energy policy, who still communicates regularly with Gulf Arab officials. “That translates to the end of rapid urbanization, the end of doing things in unbelievably energy-intensive ways.”
Naimi, who for the past five years has been telling friends he’s ready to retire, faces big risks as he sees through one more dramatic market realignment. His refusal to put Saudi Arabia and OPEC once again in the swing producer role, cutting supply to balance the market, hurts economically troubled member states that most need a price rebound. In Venezuela, where the economy is teetering and foreign-exchange reserves are depleted, oil’s collapse blows a bigger hole in the government budget and deepens the crisis. Iran, which needs high prices to help offset the effect of sanctions that have choked off its exports, has had harsh words for the Saudi-led policy. Persian Gulf producers should try to halt the decline in prices, a deputy foreign minister said on state-run television in January, and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif delayed a meeting with his Saudi counterpart due to the discord. Regional tensions were highlighted in late March, when Saudi Arabia led airstrikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels, seeking to counter Iranian influence there.
Venezuela faces a deepening economic crisis as low oil prices strangle export revenue. Caracas residents line up outside a store for scarce groceries.
Cristian Hernandez/Anadolu Agendy/Getty Images
Still, Naimi has said several times since the November meeting that he doesn’t know how low prices might go or when they will recover—and that the Saudis are willing to wait and see. Naimi’s concerns for Saudi Arabia are further in the future.
“Our ultimate aim is to diversify away from our overreliance on oil revenues,” the petroleum minister said at a 2013 seminar in Washington. The centerpiece of that effort is the establishment of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology on the Red Sea, north of Jeddah. Naimi, who was CEO of state oil producer Saudi Aramco before becoming petroleum minister, recounted how, at a council of ministers meeting in 2006, the monarch took his hand and asked if he could build a university. “I said: ‘Your Majesty, we have built—I mean, Saudi Aramco has built—a lot of refineries, gas plants, pipelines, some housing. But universities? No. But we can, if you want.’ And we did.”
At OPEC’s November meeting in Vienna, Ali al-Naimi refused to sign on to a proposed reduction in output meant to boost prices as the cartel has done in the past.
Samuel Kubani/AFP/Getty Images
While the university is key to Saudi Arabia’s diversification effort, there are other initiatives for the nearer term. The kingdom already is exploiting its huge deposits of phosphates to export fertilizer and is mining bauxite to smelt and roll aluminum. Eventually, Naimi says, Saudi Arabia wants to manufacture finished goods such as car parts. “We are generating job opportunities for our young people, encouraging enterprise, and providing the right environment for innovation and progress,” Naimi said at the Washington seminar. “It’s not easy, and it will not happen overnight. But it is happening.”
How much time Saudi Arabia has to prepare for the eventual decline of the oil era may depend, in part, on how alternatives fare during this period of cheap oil. Will sales of wind turbines and solar panels stay strong? Or will they enter a tailspin like they did during the Great Recession, when project financing dried up? And will sales of electric vehicles continue to climb even as gasoline prices slump?
Adam Sieminski, head of the U.S. Energy Information Administration, said at a Washington forum in late January that lower crude prices wouldn’t slow development of wind and solar power because there’s little direct competition with oil in electricity generation. Electric vehicles, he said, are helped by tax incentives and government policies and perhaps also by the cachet of green technology.
“The Saudis may be once again trying to prolong the age of oil,” says Bill McKibben, the author and environmental activist who has helped lead the campaign to block the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil from Canada’s tar sands to the U.S. market. “But it feels like the steady, relentless fall in costs for renewables may make this different from other cycles.”
Naimi, who carefully manages his public comments the way a central banker or top diplomat might, hasn’t said how close he thinks the world may be to a peak in oil demand. He didn’t respond to requests to be interviewed for this story. But he has articulated his view that the crude market can no longer be understood without considering the effects alternative energy sources are having. “One has to be realistic,” Naimi told the Middle East Economic Survey in an interview published in December. “There are many things in the energy market—not the oil market—that will determine prices in the future. A lot of effort is being exerted worldwide, whether in research or boosting efficiency or using nonfossil fuels.”
At 12, Naimi became a mail boy at Aramco, taking over for his brother after his sudden death, and he quickly shined as a star typist. One day at the Aramco offices, the American CEO stopped Naimi in the hallway and asked the teenager what he wanted to do with his life, says Peter van de Kamp, who became friends with Naimi at Lehigh University, recounting a story Naimi told their classmates in the early 1960s. “Well, sir, someday I would like to have your job,” Naimi answered. “If that’s the case,” the American said, “you’ll need an education.”
Aramco sent Naimi to school in Beirut and then to Lehigh in Pennsylvania and Stanford University in California, where he earned a master’s degree in geology. At Lehigh, the chair of the geology department assigned the 6-foot-5-inch Van de Kamp to watch out for Naimi, who’s around 5 feet tall. The transfer student from a Mideast country few students had heard of was a good companion, Van de Kamp says, respectful of Christians and Jews, comfortable socializing with women. He was eager to chop firewood and “get his hands dirty” doing chores at the Van de Kamps’ New Jersey home on holidays, he says. Proud of his Bedouin roots, Naimi told stories about tending sheep and goats in a forbidding desert with scarce food or water. He did his senior research project in 1962 on the commercial mining potential of New Jersey’s beach sand. “Ali was a comer; we all could see it,” says Van de Kamp, who’s now a geologist in Oregon.
After returning to Saudi Arabia, Naimi zoomed through a series of oil production and executive positions at Aramco, culminating in his 1984 appointment as the company’s first Saudi president and, four years later, its CEO. At the time, U.S. and European consumption was in decline, due in part to sluggish economic growth and conservation measures adopted after the oil shocks of the 1970s. In response, Petroleum Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani slashed Saudi oil output from 10 million barrels a day in 1981 to just 3.5 million in 1986. Prices kept falling, briefly getting to around $10 a barrel, as non-OPEC producers and cartel members cheating on their quotas filled the gap. In 1986, King Fahd fired Yamani, and the Saudis flooded the world with cheap oil to seize back market share—and induce Americans to resume their gas-guzzling habits. (The era of big SUVs was just beginning.)
Aramco’s new president saw firsthand what happened when the Saudis cut output and others didn’t, a lesson he cites today. “We will not make the same mistake again,” he said in Berlin in March.
Naimi’s tenure got off to a rough start. With demand rising in China, he persuaded OPEC to expand production in November 1997, just as the Asian financial crisis was deepening. During the next two years, oil prices fell 50 percent.
He also mishandled Saudi Arabia’s overture to Western energy companies to help develop the kingdom’s natural gas reserves. By 1998, then-Crown Prince Abdullah was trying to lure back foreign firms to tap Saudi gas for industrial projects such as electricity generation, water desalinization, and petrochemical manufacturing. Naimi, however, kept the best gas fields for Aramco while offering Exxon Mobil and dozens of other companies blocks that some Saudi geologists doubted contained much commercial gas, according to Sadad al-Husseini, who led Aramco’s exploration and production operations from 1985 to 2003.
The Exxon Mobil negotiations blew up in 2003, at the home of Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal in Beverly Hills, California, according to journalist Steve Coll’s book Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, published in 2012. Exxon Mobil’s then-CEO Lee Raymond informed Faisal and Naimi that the Saudi field on offer didn’t have enough gas to warrant his investment, Coll wrote. Naimi responded that Exxon Mobil’s experts were playing down the block’s potential to get a better deal. At that point, Raymond exploded at Naimi for questioning his people’s integrity, and the deal soon fell apart, Coll wrote. “I was very unhappy,” Raymond says in an interview. “The reality was that there was never access to the potential reserves you would need to support the project.”
Over time, Naimi earned a reputation as a straight talker and a shrewd manager of the global market. Despite the Saudis’ dire warnings to President George W. Bush not to invade Iraq in 2003, Naimi kept markets stable by promising to pump more oil during the war. In 2008, as prices soared to a record $147 a barrel, he resisted intense U.S. pressure to raise output again. Judging shrewdly that market conditions were very different than they were five years earlier, he argued in several contentious meetings with American officials that supply was adequate and that financial speculators were driving up prices. “The line was clear and consistent, even if it wasn’t a message the American administration wanted to hear,” says Ford Fraker, the U.S. ambassador to Riyadh from 2007 to 2009 and president of the Middle East Policy Council.
Iran has been exporting less because of international sanctions, making the decline in the price of crude an even worse blow to its economy.
Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images
Afterward, Naimi summoned the press to vent. He’d never seen such unreasonable obstinacy, said the minister, seated in a plush chair in his hotel suite. He’d tried to persuade the others that demand for OPEC’s crude had long since surpassed the recession levels that prevailed when the target was last set in 2008. They wouldn’t listen.
After some dogged diplomacy, OPEC raised the quota at its next meeting. Oil prices spiked early in the Arab Spring, and then they declined through the rest of 2011.
“He’s a man of few words but none wasted,” says Daniel Poneman, the U.S. deputy secretary of energy from 2009 to 2014. “He really came through.”
Naimi was a study in inscrutability when the OPEC ministers gathered this past November in Vienna. That morning, he slipped out the back door of his hotel on the city’s Ringstrasse, trailed by a gaggle of reporters through the medieval backstreets. This brisk morning walk had become known as a moment when Naimi would share his thoughts, but he wasn’t talking. A little later, back at OPEC headquarters, impatient with a television crew’s badgering questions, Naimi lost his legendary cool. “Get the hell out,” he snapped.
Inside the closed-door session, the OPEC ministers sat in alphabetical order around a large rectangular table. Naimi, silver-haired and dressed in a dark suit, blue-purple tie, and matching breast-pocket handkerchief, was seated between Gulf Arab allies Qatar and the U.A.E. Across the table, Venezuela’s Rafael Ramirez opened the proceedings with a proposal for a production cut to be jointly implemented by OPEC, Russia, and Mexico, according to the officials briefed on the proceedings.
Russia, where Vladimir Putin confidant Igor Sechin, left, is chairman of state-controlled oil company Rosneft, saw the ruble decline almost in unison with the price of crude.
Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
Naimi next shot down an Algerian proposal, supported by seven member states, for a 5 percent output reduction levied only on OPEC producers. That might boost prices today, Naimi said, but wouldn’t solve OPEC’s longer-term problem with shale producers and declining demand growth. His reasoning prevailed, as usual.
Demand anxiety, always lurking in the Saudi psyche, had surged after U.S. President Barack Obama took office. At first, in 2009, Naimi told American diplomats he wasn’t worried that alternative energy sources would reduce oil use because global consumption was soaring, especially in China and India, according to U.S. diplomatic cables. But six months later, in Ambassador Smith’s 2010 memo to Energy Secretary Chu, the envoy said Saudi leaders “were caught off guard by the strength of the Administration’s initial statements about its desire to move to a post-hydrocarbon economy and end dependence on imported oil.”
Alarm was heightened, the ambassador reported, because the Saudis were just finishing a $100 billion expansion of their production capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day. “Saudi leaders are concerned that this oil may never be needed,” Smith wrote. “They are less concerned about price forecasts than our expectations of the scope and pace of changes globally.”
Other classified cables released by WikiLeaks described the Saudis as “obstructionist” and “schizophrenic” on curbing climate change—launching solar and carbon-sequestration projects at home while impeding multilateral talks abroad. “Part of the explanation for this schizophrenic position is that the Saudi Government has not yet thought through all the implications of a climate change agreement, in part because it may not fully understand the various demand scenarios,” Smith wrote after the 2009 U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen.
While Copenhagen didn’t lead to any binding agreement, governments have tightened carbon emission limits and other environmental rules in the years since. Efficiency improvements have kept coming. And the Saudi government has been thinking through the implications.
Naimi had put off retirement because King Abdullah asked him to stay. After Abdullah’s death on Jan. 23, King Salman kept Naimi as petroleum minister to signal consistency in Saudi policy during the transition. Still, Naimi is likely to soon have more time to devote to his university and the industrial and technological transformation he envisions for his country. As an Aramco executive and then as a globe-trotting oil diplomat, Naimi has shown great talent for bridging the divide between Westerners and the kingdom’s traditional leaders. And he’s overseen a Saudi industry that is an engine of science and progress.
In 2010, Naimi escorted Chu to visit King Abdullah at his palace in the desert oasis of Rawdhat Khuraim. The elderly monarch was in a philosophical mood and took the opportunity to pose a few questions to the Nobel laureate physicist, says Smith, who went along for the visit.
“Tell me how the universe was formed,” the king asked, in Smith’s recounting. Chu patiently laid out the story of the Big Bang theory. “What does that mean for God?” the monarch said. Chu and Smith conferred for a moment on an appropriate, diplomatic response. “There are some things we know, and for other things, we have God,” Chu replied.
“And tell me, how did we get all this oil?” King Abdullah asked. As Chu described how organisms decomposed over millions of years, Naimi whispered in Smith’s ear, “I’ve told him this a hundred times.”
This story appears in the May 2015 issue of Bloomberg Markets. With assistance from Grant Smith in London.
