Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, plans to become an expert in another, cleaner field of energy by investing in solar power, the country's oil minister said in an interview released Sunday. “For a country like Saudi Arabia ... one of the most important sources of energy to look at and to develop is solar energy,” Ali Al-Naimi told French oil newsletter Petrostrategies. He added: “One of the research efforts that we are going to undertake is to see how we make Saudi Arabia a centre for solar energy research and hopefully over the next 30 to 50 years we will be a major megawatt exporter. “In the same way we are an oil exporter, we can also be an exporter of power.” Al-Naimi said that Saudi Arabia was also set to invest in carbon capture and storage programs to develop technology allowing carbon dioxide to be extracted from the atmosphere and stored underground. “There are a lot of countries that are willing to cooperate with us,” he said. At a summit in Riyadh last November, Gulf OPEC members pledged $750 million (500 million euros) to a new fund to tackle global warming through financing research for clean technologies, with the emphasis on carbon capture and storage. Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company, will take a 50 percent stake in a 12.5 billion-yuan ($1.8 billion) oil refinery that China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. is building. The refinery at Qingdao in Shandong province will start processing crude oil in early April, Zhou Yuan, the vice chairman of Sinopec, as China Petroleum is known, said in an interview in Beijing on Friday. Sinopec will take the remaining 50 percent stake, according to Zhou. China, the world's second-biggest energy-consuming nation, plans to increase oil-refining capacity 25 percent by 2010. The country's biggest oil refiner started construction of the 10 million metric tons-a-year refinery in June 2005 to bolster its ability to supply fuels and chemicals to the world's fastest- growing major economy. Sinopec is in discussions to sell a stake of its Qingdao refinery to Aramco and the talks may be completed “anytime” after partners agree on terms, Abdulaziz F. Al-Khayyal, the Saudi company ‘s senior vice-president for industrial relations, said Sept. 7. Seperately, Sinopec's $5 billion joint refining plant with Kuwait Petroleum Corp. in the southern province of Guangdong may be delayed as it awaits environmental approval, Zhou said. “So far we haven't obtained the approval from the state environmental agency.” Al-Naimi said in remarks published on Friday that speculation is driving triple-digit oil making it impossible for any organization to control price movement. “Speculation in futures market is determining prices,” Ali al-Naimi told an Arabic daily in Morocco. “Today there is no link between oil (market) fundamentals and prices.” “The duty of oil exporters is to make sure that fundamentals are healthy,” said Al-Naimi. “If these fundamentals were stable and fulfill market needs, then there is no need to raise or decrease production,” the minister added. __
