The Boeing 767 banked over the Red Sea, turning east into Saudi Arabia. A commercial version of the plane can carry about 260 passengers. Inside this one, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman and a dozen or so aides were heading home from a tumultuous meeting at OPEC’s headquarters in Vienna the day before.
For most of the journey, the jetliner had followed its expected route over Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and Egypt. It was a path Abdulaziz had flown scores of times. As oil minister since 2019 and a royal understudy before that, he’d attended almost every OPEC meeting in the past 35 years.
But this flight, on March 7, 2020, wasn’t typical. What occurred afterward wasn’t, either.
The decisions Abdulaziz took over the next 24 hours exposed a new Saudi oil policy—bolder, less constrained by Washington, defiant of a growing global consensus on climate change, and more centrally controlled by the royal family, including one of his half-brothers, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
They also reflected what Abdulaziz sees as his destiny: to ensure that the last barrel of oil on the face of the Earth comes from a Saudi well. As he said in June during a private event organized by Bank of America Corp., according to a person familiar with the meeting, “We are still going to be the last man standing, and every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.”
All of this has huge implications for the world’s energy markets at a time when, in erecting a fortress to safeguard oil, Abdulaziz and Saudi Arabia seem to be on the wrong side of history. Abdulaziz, the first member of the royal family to be the kingdom’s energy minister, is the most important single person in the oil market today. As influential in global economic terms as some central bankers, he has repeatedly taken bold, successful steps to control the markets, manage the flow of oil supplies, and shore up prices.
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