132SHIFTING GEARS IN SAUDI ARABIAVienna. Those who ran alongside were rewarded with scraps of detail
for their stories.^36 By 2016, after nearly seventy years in the Saudi oil sec-
tor, Naimi was finally allowed to retire. But instead of simply appoint-
ing a replacement minister, King Salman leveraged the opportunity to
fix another problematic aspect of Saudi energy governance. He merged
Naimi’s ministry with the Ministry of Electricity and Water, whose
director, Abdullah al- Hasin, had been fired.
Combining the two discordant fiefs of Saudi energy policy was
another move that Saudi technocrats had been dreaming of under King
Abdullah. The two ministries had long worked at cross purposes. Naimi’s
oil ministry had been externally focused, concerned mainly with pro-
ducing enough oil for export and managing international market strat-
egy. The oil minister had no control over domestic consumption of oil
and gas in power generation, which fell under the purview of al- Hasin’s
electricity ministry. Al- Hasin’s objective was to meet domestic demand
for electricity and water, no matter what the effect on exports. The cru-
cial matter of demand management had fallen through the cracks.
The new body, the Ministry of Energy, Industry, and Natural Resources,
now governed the entire energy landscape. It could see that internal
needs were met while also guaranteeing that Saudi demand didn’t con-
flict with exports or the industrial strategy that underpins the king-
dom’s GDP. Picked to run the “super ministry” was the former Saudi
Aramco CEO Khalid al- Falih. A mechanical engineer schooled at Texas
A&M, al- Falih had deftly scaled the ranks inside Saudi Aramco. On the
world stage, al- Falih’s competence was so obvious that many observers
considered the Dammam native to outshine the CEOs of the big West-
ern oil firms that had created Aramco so many years ago.
Al- Falih had long spoken in support of price reforms. As minister, he
would now oversee them. In August 2016, it fell to al- Falih to declare the
first sign of success of the January price increases: a drop in the king-
dom’s summer “crude burn,” the peak period when crude oil is burned
to power the kingdom’s millions of air conditioners. Saudi burning of
crude oil averaged 572,000 b/d in 2015. In 2016, it fell to 497,000 b/d.
In 2017, it fell again, reaching 458,000 b/d.^37 “The efficiency program
that we adapted during the last three years has started bearing fruit,