CONOCOPHILLIPS ON PLANNED YANBU REFINERY, SAUDI

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 RIYADH 000958

SIPDIS

DEPT FOR NEA/ARP(HARRIS) AND EEB/ESC/IEC(SULLIVAN)

E.O. 12958: DECL: 07/22/2019
TAGS: ECON EPET PGOV SA
SUBJECT: CONOCOPHILLIPS ON PLANNED YANBU REFINERY, SAUDI
INVESTMENT CLIMATE

Classified By: DCM David Rundell, reasons 1.4 (b) and (d).

CORRECTED COPY. FIXED SUBJECT LINE.

SUMMARY
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1. (C) ConocoPhillips President for the Middle East and North
Africa Nick Spencer told DCM July 12 his company is committed
to building the planned 400K barrel/day oil refinery in Yanbu
with Saudi Aramco, with construction to begin next year and
first production in 2014. Spencer said the Saudi investment
climate has gotten better for foreign firms but remained
challenging. He discussed plans to open offices in Riyadh,
Jeddah, and/or Yanbu, which probably remain months away. End
summary.

CONOCOPHILLIPS REFINERY BACK ON TRACK
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2. (C) ConocoPhillips President for the Middle East and North
Africa Nick Spencer (please protect) met DCM and Econcouns
July 12 to discuss the company's planned $6 billion refinery
in Yanbu, 400 kilometers north of Jeddah along the Red Sea.
Spencer said ConocoPhillips' plan is for the refinery to
begin operations in the third quarter of 2014. He said it
eventually will process 400 thousand barrels per day of Saudi
heavy crude, which he described as "big by current standards,
and fairly big by future standards." According to Spencer,
the refinery will only produce fuels, and there is no plan to
integrate it into any other plant (e.g., petrochemicals); he
cited problems that the Saudi Aramco refinery at Ras Tanura
in the Eastern Province has encountered in trying to do so.
In addition to gasoline and diesel, Spencer said the refinery
will produce sulfur for export to China and India, fuel coat
for the power industry, and "a little bit of benzene."
(Note: Another 400K barrels/day refinery is being built in
the Royal Commission town of Jubail along the Persian Gulf
coast, a mirror image of the ConocoPhillips refinery.)

SAUDI INVESTMENT CLIMATE
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3. (C) Asked how ConocoPhillips found doing business in Saudi
Arabia and the Gulf, Spencer said Saudi Aramco generally
worked well with foreign firms. He noted that respect for
property rights in Saudi Arabia had improved over the years,
while concerns about security and quality of life still made
it "an uphill battle" for his and other firms to persuade
"the best people" to work here. He emphasized it was very
important to do so, since the business climate in Saudi
Arabia requires foreign firms to bring in highly capable
personnel with "leadership to drive things, and technical
skills to fill local capability gaps."

RE-OPENING AN OFFICE IN SAUDI ARABIA
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4. (C) Spencer said he was visiting the Kingdom this time to
gather information related to reestablishing offices in
Riyadh, Jeddah, and/or Yanbu. He asked for the Embassy's
assessment of the security situation and the King's support
for political and legal reforms. Spencer and DCM agreed that
having an office in Riyadh would be important to maintain
contact with the Saudi national government, as opposed to
solely Yanbu, which despite the King's July 14 visit (with
the U.S. Treasury Secretary, septel),remained relatively
isolated politically from the national government. The two
agreed that Saudi leaders remembered which firms left Saudi
Arabia when the Kingdom's security situation declined after
the 9/11 attacks (and especially in 2003-04, at the height of
the Al Qaeda insurrection in the Kingdom),and it would be
important for ConocoPhillips to signal that it planned to
remain in Saudi Arabia for many years to come. Spencer
indicated that his firm had not selected where to open its
Riyadh office; however, he mentioned that ConocoPhillips has
maintained a villa in the Riyadh Diplomatic Quarter for years
(vacant since the company closed its Riyadh office),which it
plans to reoccupy. Spencer said opening offices in Saudi
Arabia remained months away but he and his staff would begin
traveling here more frequently in the coming weeks.

FAMILIES LIKELY TO BE HOUSED IN JEDDAH
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5. (C) In a July 19 conversation with CG in Jeddah, Spencer
said the company is looking to bring over 60-70
American/European employees on 3-4 year contracts but
acknowledged the difficulty of recruitment. Spencer told the
CG that in considering where to house personnel and their

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families, he was weighing factors such as the quality of
schools, medical facilities, shopping centers, and
recreational opportunities, as well as less tangible factors
like Jeddah's relatively more open social environment.
Spencer had expressed concern about the lack of an
American/international school in Yanbu and said he understood
the American school in Jeddah had "fizzled away" when many
expatriate students departed following the December 2004
strike on U.S. Consulate General Jeddah. However, there is a
school affiliated with the branch of the International
Schools Group headquartered in Dhahran that is located in
Yanbu, and after discovering that the American International
School was still very much a growing concern, Spence
r said his company was seriously considering locating
families with children in Jeddah housing compounds and having
employees commute to Yanbu for the work week.

COMMENT
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6. (C) The Yanbu refinery was put on hold when oil prices
dropped sharply last year, and many of our contacts
questioned whether the company would remain committed to the
project when the market seemed so volatile, unpredictable,
and arguably unfavorable to the deal. Now, with oil prices
rising again and construction materials cheaper, the project
is back on track. A few local contacts have asserted that
the project will remain unprofitable under nearly all likely
economic scenarios, and therefore the refinery is only
designed to help ConocoPhillips reestablish a presence in the
Kingdom. Spencer acknowledged the political/symbolic
significance of the planned refinery but made clear that his
company believes the project will prove to be a good
investment on its own, even without these other benefits.
ERDMAN