Saudi Arabia Is Buying Up America's Oil Assets

Correction: Qatar Petroleum, along with ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, built the GoldenPass LNG facility on the Gulf Coast.  The plant, one of the largest in the world, began operations in 2010.  Qatar Petroleum owns 70% of the facilities and is currently pursuing authorization from the U.S. government to export American produced LNG to customers around the globe.

Saudi Arabia is quietly amassing quite a portfolio of American energy assets. State-owned Saudi Aramco is already co-owner, with Royal Dutch Shell , of Motiva, the largest U.S. refinery. Under an already signed agreement, in April 2017, Aramco will take full ownership of the most valuable Motiva assets. Now comes news that Motiva is the leading candidate to purchase the Lyondell Basell Refinery in Houston. This would give Saudi Arabia control of two major Texas refineries proving, once again, that American energy independence is impossible.

Saudi Arabia is not the only country with energy assets in the U.S. and close energy ally, Canada, but Saudi Arabia’s activities present a good case study because of its efforts at global diversification within the energy industry. In the free market of the United States, foreign companies can invest in and even purchase or create energy assets on American shores. Such assets can include refineries and petrochemical plants; oil, gas, and coal rights; alternative energy startups; and utilities. Countries and national oil companies like Saudi Arabia and Saudi Aramco do just that.

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Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures LLC is a fund that invests in global energy and technology companies and in other funds that invest in such companies. Its newest U.S. investment is in Zahroof Valves, which produces valves for gas compressors. Siluria Technologies, another U.S. investment, develops technologies to convert natural gas to liquid. Through investment in other funds like Braemar Engery Ventures, it reaches more global and U.S. assets.

Aramco also operates three research centers in the United States: in Houston, Cambridge, and Detroit. The Cambridge location is beside MIT, all the better to access top talent. Where there is opportunity, smart energy companies will participate, and they need not be American.

Aramco will have an exclusive license to use the Shell gasoline brand in Texas, Mississippi, the Southeast, and the Mid-Atlantic upon the closure of the Motiva deal in April. That means if you pump gas from a Shell gas station in Atlanta, Baltimore, or Dallas next summer, you are buying gas from Saudi Aramco. It may be American or Canadian pumped gas—or it may be Saudi-pumped or from somewhere altogether different—but it is refined by a Saudi company (with American labor) and sold by a Saudi company (with American labor).

Qatar Petroleum owns a majority share in the Golden Pass LNG plant, one of the largest LNG facilities in the world.  BP is not a fully nationalized British company but is owned in large part by government interests and British pension funds. It operates across North America, from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska. Statoil , the national oil company of Norway, has owned significant shale rights in the U.S., and though they have divested from much of it, they still maintain rights in Ohio and elsewhere.

The U.S. operates a generally free market energy economy. Foreign interests are free to invest, and these sophisticated companies do when they see opportunity. With foreign energy powers investing in, supporting, and profiting off of American energy assets, energy independence is an impossible dream. Realistically, the U.S. should focus on achieving energy security.

[Note: there is a global element to the supply, demand, and pricing of energy that also precludes true independence, but that is for another column].