Falih detailed some of the challenges and opportunities faced by the Middle East energy industry and noted that, with proper preparation and long-range vision, those same challenges could present opportunities. Later at the conference, senior vice president of Refining, Marketing and International Khalid G. Al-Buainain discussed the changes taking place in Saudi Aramco's business portfolio. “We are currently in the midst of a fundamental transformation of our downstream business portfolio, with refining projects that will make Saudi Aramco one of the five largest players in the world in terms of global crude distillation capacity by the year 2013, and are making our first inroads into ‘liquids-based' petrochemicals,” he said. Among the company's plans, he said are a doubling of Ras Tanura Refinery to nearly 1 million bpd and the building of joint-venture export-oriented refineries in Jubail and Yanbu‘. Each of those refineries, expected to go on-stream in 2012, will have 400,000 bpd capacity. --MORE
