The Other Face Of Saudi Aramco

摘要

Nabilah al-tunisi was wrapping up an executive M.B. A. at Stanford University two summers ago when she got an urgent call from Saudi Aramco headquarters in Dhahran. Pack your bags, she was told, and move to Houston. Al-Tunisi had just been put in charge of the engineering on a new $25 billion refinery and petrochemicals plant-the Ras Tanura Integrated Project.rnRas Tanura, a tiny finger in the Persian Gulf, already has a 550,000-barrel-per-day refinery, Aramco's biggest. Under a joint venture with Dow Chemical, refining capacity will nearly double; 4.5 million tons a year of basic chemicals and 7 million tons of plastics will be produced. It is the most prodigious diversification ever for the worlds largest producer of oil-and the state-owned Saudi company put a woman at the helm.