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Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Photographs: Bloomberg (2) |
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 that Abdulaziz had flown scores of times. As oil minister since 2019 and a royal understudy before that, he’d attended almost every OPEC meeting over 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.”
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